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FOUR    FRENCHWOxMEN 


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iiS!at.Vi?.-iLBi»Ui' 


Four  Frenchwomen 


BY 


AUSTIN    DOBSON 


NEW   YORK 

DODD,   MEAD,   AND   COMPANY 

Publishers 


University  Press: 
John  Wilson  and  Son,  Cambridge. 


Xw^^ 


To  MY  Friend 
BRANDER    MATTHEWS 


PREFATORY  NOTE. 


A  MONG  reasons  for  reprinting  these  papers,  two 
■**■  chiefly  may  be  mentioned,  —  one,  that  they  were 
originally  planned  for  publication  in  book-form  ;  the 
other,  that  by  re-issuing  them  now,  the  author  has 
been  enabled  to  give  them  the  revision  of  which, 
from  lapse  of  time,  they  stood  in  need. 

It  may  be  objected  that  the  Princess  de  Lamballe 
was,  by  birth,  an  Italian.  But  by  her  marriage,  by 
the  more  important  part  of  her  life,  and  above  all 
by  her  tragic  death,  she  belongs  to  the  country  of 
her  adoption. 


CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Mademoiselle  de  Corday i 

Madame  Roland 31 

The  Princess  de  Lamballe 63 

Madame  de  Genlis 107 


MADEMOISELLE   DE   CORDAY. 

1768-1793. 


"  Comprendre,  c'est  pardonner." 

Madame  de  Stael. 

Ah  1  judge  her  gently,  who  so  grandly  erred. 

So  singly  smote,  and  so  serenely  fell ; 
Where  the  wild  Anarch's  hurrying  drums  are  heard, 

The  frenzy  fires  the  finer  souls  as  well. 


FOUR    FRENCHWOMEN. 


I. 

"pARIS  streets  have  had  their  changes.  If, 
-*■  now-a-days,  you  want  the  Rue  des  Cor- 
deliers, you  must  ask  for  the  Rue  de  T^cole 
de  Medecine,  and  even  between  these  two  the 
place  has  been  three  times  christened.  In  the 
room  of  the  old  Grey  Friars  church  has  sprung 
up  a  spacious  college  ;  where  once,  in  the  silent 
convent-garden,  the  flat-foot  fathers  shuffled  to 
and  fro,  crowds  of  students  now  swarm  daily 
to  the  dissecting-rooms.  Peaceful  professors 
dilate  leisurely  on  the  circulation  of  the  blood 
where  once,  in  the  hall  of  the  erst-famous  club, 
Danton  flashed  suddenly  into  a  furious  elo- 
quence, or  Marat  cried  for  "  heads."  The  serge 
and  three-knot  girdle  have  yielded  to  the  scalpel 
and  the  saw. 

Nearly  a  century  ago,  there  lived  in  the  Rue 
des  Cordeliers  one  who   had   made   himself  a 


2  Four  Frenchwomen. 

power  in  France.  Long  before  the  tocsin  first 
sounded  in  1788,  this  man  —  half  dwarf,  half 
maniac,  foiled  plagiarist  and  savant  manqud, 
prurient  romancer,  rancorous  libeller,  envious, 
revengeful,  and  despised  —  had  heaped  up  infi- 
nite hatred  of  all  things  better  than  himself. 
"  Cain  in  the  social  scale,"  he  took  his  stand 
upon  the  lowest  grade,  and  struck  at  all  above 
him  with  dog-like  ferocity,  with  insatiable  malig- 
nity. Champion  of  the  canaille,  he  fought  their 
battles,  and  the  "  common  cry  of  curs  "  was  his. 
Denounced  to  the  Constituent  Assembly,  hunted 
by  the  Paris  Commune,  besieged  in  his  house 
by  Lafayette ;  shielded  by  Danton  ;  hidden  by 
Legendre  ;  sheltered  by  the  actress  Fleury  ; 
sheltered  by  the  priest  Bassal ;  proscribed,  pur- 
sued, and  homeless,  he  still  fought  on,  and  the 
publication  of  L'  Ami  du  Peuple  was  not  de- 
layed for  a  single  hour.  By  the  name  that  he 
had  conquered,  all  Paris  knew  him.  Woe  to  the 
noble  who  was  "  recommended  "  by  the  remorse- 
less "  People's  Friend  1 "  Woe  to  the  suspect 
who  fell  into  the  clutches  of  that  crafty  "  Prussian 
Spider  1  "  Day  after  day  he  might  be  seen  at 
the  Convention,  —  cynical,  injurious,  venomous; 
dressed  in  a  filthy  shirt,  a  shabby,  patched 
surtout,  and  ink-stained  velvet  smalls  ;  his  hair 
knotted  tightly  with  a  thong,    his    shoes  tied 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  3 

carelessly  with  string.  Men  knew  the  enormous 
head  and  pallid,  leaden  face  ;  the  sloping,  wild- 
beast  brows  and  piercing,  tigerish  eyes ;  the 
croaking,  "frog-like  mouth;"  the  thin  lips, 
bulged  like  an  adder's  poison-bag,  —  men  knew 
the  convulsive  gestures,  the  irrepressible  arm 
with  its  fluttering  proscription  list,  the  strident 
voice  that  cried  incessantly  for  "  heads,  " —  now 
for  five  hundred,  now  for  five  hundred  thousand. 
All  Paris  knew  the  triumvir  Marat,  who,  in 
concert  with  Robespierre  and  the  Mountain, 
was  slowly  floating  France  in  blood. 

It  is  easy,  from  the  abundant  records,  to  con- 
struct the  story  of  his  death.  In  July,  1793,  the 
citizen  Marat  was  ill.  For  three  years  he  had 
struggled  with  a  disorder,  to  which  sooner  or 
later  he  must  have  succumbed.  His  physician, 
although  he  sedulously  attended  him,  had  no 
hope  of  saving  his  life.  He  had  ceased  to 
appear  at  the  meetings  of  the  Convention  ; 
Robespierre  and  Danton  had  refused  him  "  a 
head  or  two."'  A  Jacobin  deputation,  sent  to 
inquire  into  his  health,  reported  that  they  had 
found  their  brother  Marat  occupied  unweariedly 
for  the  public  good.  "It  is  not  a  malady," 
said  they,  "  but  an  indisposition  which  Mes- 
sieurs of  the  C6t6  Droit  will  hardly  catch.  It  is 
a  superabundant  patriotism  pressed  and  repressed 


4  Four  Frenchwomen. 

in  too  small  a  body.  The  violent  efforts  that  it 
makes  at  escape  are  killing  him."  In  a  word,  the 
citizen  Marat  was  dying  of  disease  aggravated  by 
envy,  disappointment,  and  unquenched  lust  of 
blood.  During  the  whole  of  June  he  had  never 
ceased  —  with  a  head  frenzied  by  strong  remedial 
stimulants,  with  a  pen  that  pain  caused  to  tremble 
in  his  hand  —  to  cry  feverishly  for  slaughter. 
These  were,  in  fact,  those  "  exhalations  of  a 
too  active  patriotism "  that  were  killing  the 
People's  Friend, 

On  the  13th  of  July,  at  about  half-past  seven 
in  the  evening,  the  citizen  Marat  was  sitting  in 
his  bath,  writing.  The  citizen  certainly  affected, 
perhaps  actually  enjoyed,  the  luxury  of  poverty. 
A  rough  board  laid  across  the  bath  served  him  for 
a  desk  ;  an  unhewn  block  supported  his  ("nkstand. 
The  floor  was  littered  with  numbers  of  his  jour- 
nal, but  the  room  was  bare  of  furniture.  A  map 
of  France  hung  upon  the  wall,  together  with  a 
brace  of  pistols,  above  which  was  scrawled  in 
large,   bold  letters,   "■  La  Mort." 

By-and-by  comes  in  a  young  man  named 
Pillet,  bringing  paper  for  the  printing  of  VAmi 
du  Peuple,  which  was  done  in  the  author's  house. 
Marat  asked  him  to  open  the  window,  approved 
his  account,  and  sent  him  away.  As  he  came 
out  there  was  a  kind  of  altercation  between  the 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  5 

portress,  who  was  folding  sheets,  and  a  hand- 
some young  lady,  wearing  a  dark  hat  trimmed 
with  green  ribbons.  She  held  a  fan  in  her  hand, 
and  was  complaining,  in  a  singularly  clear  and 
musical  voice,  that  she  had  come  a  long  journey 
—  all  the  way  from  Caen  —  to  see  the  People's 
Friend.  It  appeared  from  the  conversation 
that  she  had  already  called  that  day.  "  Had 
he  received  her  note  asking  for  an  interview  ?  " 
The  portress  scarcely  knew,  he  had  so  many. 
At  this  moment  appeared  another  woman  — 
Simonne  Evrard  —  who,  listening  to  the  im- 
portunities of  the  stranger,  consented  at  last  to 
see  if  Marat  would  receive  her.  Marat,  who 
had  read  her  note  some  twenty  minutes  pre- 
viously, answered  in  the  affirmative,  and  the 
women  showed  her  in. 

It  is  not  exactly  known  what  took  place  be- 
tween Marat  and  his  visitor  in  their  ten  minutes' 
interview.  According  to  her  after  account,  he 
listened  eagerly  to  the  news  from  Caen,  taking 
notes  "  for  the  scaffold  "  the  while.  He  asked 
for  the  names  of  the  Girondist  deputies  then 
refuged  at  that  place.  She  gave  them,  —  Guadet, 
Gorsas,  Buzot,  Barbaroux,  and  the  rest.  "  Ced 
bien  !  Dans  peu  de  jours,  je  les  ferai  guillotiner 
tous  d,  Paris.""  His  hour  had  come.  Plucked 
suddenly  from  her  bosom,  a  bright  blade  flashed 


6  Four  Frenchwomen. 

up,  down,  and  struck  him  once  in  the  chest.  A 
terrible  blow  for  a  delicate  hand  I  —  under  the 
clavicle,  sheer  through  the  lung,  cutting  the 
carotid.  "A  moi,  ma  cMre  amie,  d.  moi ! ''  he 
shrieked.  The  next  moment  the  room  was  full. 
The  young  lady,  coming  out,  was  struck  down 
with  a  chair,  and  trampled  on  by  the  furious 
women  ;  the  guard  came  pouring  in,  and  down 
the  street  the  news  flew  like  wildfire  that  "  they 
were  killing  the  People's  Friend." 

They  lifted  out  the  livid  People's  Friend,  and 
laid  him  on  his  bed.  But  he  had  spoken  his 
last.  For  an  instant  his  glazed  eyes  turned  upon 
Simonne  Evrard,  who  was  weeping  at  his  side, 
then  closed  forever.  Medical  advice  arriving 
post-haste  was  yet  too  late.  His  death  had 
been  anticipated  by  some  eight  days.' 

Paris  was  in  consternation.  "Was  this  the  be- 
ginning of  some  dreadful  vengeance  upon  the 
patriots,  —  some  deep-laid  Federalist  conspiracy? 
They  could  not  tell.  Meanwhile,  beware  of 
green  ribbons,  and,  above  all,  honour  to  the 
People's  Friend.  Men  meeting  each  other  in 
the  street  repeated  like  an  old  tragic  chorus, 
"  //  est  mod,  V  Ami  du  Peuple  !  V  Ami  du  Peuple 
est  mort  !  "  The  Jacobins  dressed  his  bust  in 
crape  ;  the  Convention  voted  him  to  the  Pan- 
theon, where   Mirabeau   made   room  for  him. 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  7 

Senators  called  upon  David  to  paint  his  death. 
"  Aussi  le  ferai-je,  "  answers  he,  with  a  magnif- 
icent wave  of  the  arm.  Clubs  quarrelled  for 
the  body  ;  sections  squabbled  for  the  heart.  An 
immense  concourse  conducted  him  to  his  grave. 
Twenty  orators  spoke  over  his  tomb  (decreed 
by  a  beautiful  spirit  of  pastoral  simplicity  to  that 
garden  of  the  Cordeliers  "  where  at  evensong 
he  was  wont  to  read  his  journal  to  the  people  "), 
and  scrupled  not  to  link  his  name  with  names 
most  sacred.  Sculptors  were  found  to  carve  his 
features  with  the  glory  of  the  Agonist,  —  to  twist 
his  foul  headband  into  something  of  semblance 
to  a  crown  of  thorns.  His  bust  became  a  safe- 
guard for  the  houses  of  patriots,  his  name  a  name 
for  new-born  children.  Robespierre  grew  sick 
with  envy,  and  was  publicly  twitted  with  his 
jealousy.  The  citizen  Marat  was  a  martyr,  and 
the  mob   went  mad  about  him. 

After  a  time  came  the  reaction.  Some  scrib- 
bler studying  the  citizen's  voluminous  writings 
discovered  a  passage  advocating  monarchy,  and 
straightway  announced  the  fact.  "  What  1 
Marat — the  People's  Friend  —  Marat  a  royalist  ? 
Le  mis(^rable  ! "  The  rabble  rose  forthwith, 
burnt  him  in  effigy,  scraped  up  the  ashes,  hud- 
dled them  into  an  unworthy  urn,  and  hurrying  it 
along  with  ribaldry  and  execration,  flung  it  igno- 


8  Four  Frenchwomen. 

miniously  down  a  sewer  in  the  Rue  Montmartre. 
And  this  was  the  second  funeral  of  the  People's 
Friend. 


II. 

While  the  shrill  voices  of  the  newsvendors  — 
"hoarse  heralds  of  discord" — were  crying  at 
Paris  street-corners,  "  V7d  /'  Ombre  du  Patriate 
Mar-at  !  Eloge  Fundbre  de  Mar-at  I  Pani- 
gyrique  de  Mar-at !  "  —  while  Adam  Lux  was 
furtively  placarding  her  as  the  Joan  of  Arc  of  the 
Revolution,  eager  voices  were  curious  con- 
cerning the  mysterious  assassin.  "  A  virago  —  d. 
ce  quil  parait !  Hommasse,  gargonnidre  —  ri'est- 
ce  pas  vrai,  Citoyen  )"  A  monster,  a  fury,  with 
crime  written  in  her  face.  Does  n't  Capuchin 
Chabot  expressly  say  a  monster  ?  —  "  such  a  one 
as  Nature  vomits  forth  now  and  then  to  the 
mischief  of  humanity."  This  and  more,  more 
energetically  expressed.  For,  as  may  be  seen, 
the  Parisians  preferred  their  criminals  in  the 
staring  and  unmistakable  colours  of  the  romantic 
drama. 

By-and-by  the  gossipers  knew  all  that  could 
be  told,  and  Paris  to  this  day  knows  little  more. 
They  heard  that  her  name  was  Marie-Anne- 
Charlotte  de  Corday  d'  Armont ;  that  her  father 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  9 

was  a  gentleman  living  at  Argentan,  of  broken 
means,  and  crippled  with  a  law-suit ;  that  her 
life  was  blameless  and  her  beauty  great ;  that, 
horrified  by  the  revolutionary  excesses,  she  had 
conceived  the  idea  of  freeing  France  by  killing 
Marat  ;  that,  uncounselled  and  alone,  she  had 
set  out  from  Caen  to  carry  out  her  project,  and 
to  fling  away  her  being  in  return.  These  were 
the  undoubted  facts  of  her  history.  It  remains 
to  show  how  peculiarly  her  character,  education, 
and  surroundings  tended  to  thrust  her  onward 
to  that  last  act. 

Her  father,  poor  as  we  have  said,  had  dis- 
tributed his  children  amongst  his  wealthier  re- 
lations. Marie  was  assigned  to  an  uncle  at 
Vieques,  the  Abb6  de  Corday,  who  took  charge 
of  her  education.  He  taught  her  to  read  in  an 
old  copy,  religiously  preserved  by  himself,  of  the 
works  of  their  common  ancestor,  Corneille. 
Already,  in  the  pages  of  the  seventeenth  century 
Roman,  she  found  the  germ  of  that  republic 
which  became  the  ideal  of  her  life.  For,  as  she 
subsequently  said,  she  was  a  republican  long 
before  the    Revolution. 

Her  mother  died.  Then,  at  fourteen  years 
of  age,  she  was  invited  to  the  Abbaye  aux 
Dames  by  the  abbess,  Madame  de  Belzunce. 
In  those   days  the   itch    political  —  the  current 


lo  Four  Frenchwomen. 

philosophy  —  had  invaded  even  the  solitude 
of  the  convents.  Her  true  friends  to  her  — 
motherless  actually,  virtually  brotherless  and 
fatherless  —  were  her  books.  To  her  religious 
exercises  she  added  long  readings,  longer  re- 
veries. The  seed  that  sprang  in  Corneille  was 
trained  and  fostered  by  her  now  "  favourite  au- 
thors," Plutarch,  Raynal,  and  the  political  works 
of  Rousseau.  Like  Madame  Roland,  she  early 
began  to  regret  that  she  had  not  been  born  a 
Cornelia  or  Paulina,  to  sigh  for  the  "  beaux 
jours  "  of  Sparta  and  of  Rome.  The  French 
were  not  worthy  of  her  republic,  with  "  its 
austere  virtues  and  its  sublime  devotion." 
"  Our  nation,"  she  said,  "  is  too  light,  loo 
trifling ;  it  needs  retempering,  regenerating,  — 
needs  to  seek  in  the  errors  of  the  past-  the  tra- 
dition of  the  great  and  true,  the  beautiful  and 
noble  ;  to  forget  all  those  frivolities  which  beget 
the  corruption  and  degeneration  of  a  people." 
The  rumours  of  atrocities  —  ga-ira  echoes  — 
which  reached  her  in  her  quiet  retreat  filled  her 
with  horror  and  dismay.  But  while  she  de- 
tested the  men  of  the  Revolution,  she  remained 
true  throughout  life  to  her  political  theories. 

In  1787  Madame  de  Belzunce  died.  Later 
the  convents  were  suppressed.  The  young  girl, 
after  a  short  visit  to  her  father,  sought  an  asylum 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  ii 

with  a  cousin,  Madame  de  Bretteville,  who,  as 
she  quaintly  phrased  it,  did  not  know  her  visitor 
"  from  Eve  or  Adam,"  but  nevertheless  received 
her  hospitably.  Here  she  remained  until  her 
final  journey  to  Paris. 

Madame  de  Bretteville  lived  in  an  old,  gloomy, 
semi-Gothic  house,  called  the  Grand  Manoir. 
Mile,  de  Corday  mixed  to  a  slight  extent  in 
the  Caen  society,  and  more  particularly  with  the 
royalist  family  of  Faudoas.  She  was  remarked 
for  her  beauty  and  sweetness.  She  was  a  good 
musician,  sketched  cleverly,  and  talked  with 
great  clearness  and  brilliancy.  Her  letters, 
chiefly  running  on  matters  political,  were  handed 
about  with  a  certain  ostentation  by  those  who 
received  them.  At  this  time  she  had  many  ad- 
mirers, —  men  who,  years  after,  trembled  when 
they  heard  her  name,  a  voice  like  hers ;  but 
her  aversion  to  marriage  was  well  known.  An 
anecdote  related  by  her  friend,  Madame  Loyer 
de  Maromme,  will  bring  her  before  the  reader. 

Some  of  Madame  de  Bretteville's  friends  were 
leaving  Caen,  and  before  their  departure  she 
gave  them  a  farewell  dinner.  Among  the  guests 
was  a  M.  de  Tournelis,  a  cousin  of  Marie,  who 
regarded  her  with  no  slight  admiration.  The 
dinner  passed  off"  well  until  the  king's  health 
was  proposed.     Mile,  de  Corday  remained  un- 


12  Four  Frenchwomen. 

moved.  "  What,"  said  a  lady,  touching  her 
elbow,  "you  won't  drink  the  king's  health, — 
the  king,  so  good,  so  virtuous  ?  "  "I  believe  him 
virtuous,"  she  returned  in  her  low,  sweet  tones, 
"  but  a  weak  king  cannot  be  a  good  one  ;  he 
cannot  check  the  misfortunes  of  his  people."  A 
dead  silence  succeeded  this  reply  ;  the  health 
was  nevertheless  drunk,  and  the  company  sat 
down,  visibly  ill  at  ease. 

A  few  moments  after,  the  new  bishop,  Fau- 
chet,  made  his  entry  into  Caen,  escorted  by  a 
triumphal  procession  crying  —  "  Vive  la  Nation  ! 
ViveVEpiqiieConstilutionnelf"  M.  deTourn^lis 
and  M.  de  Corday,  jun.,  exasperated,  attempted 
to  answer  by  cries  of  "  Vive  le  Roi !  "  and  were 
with  great  difficulty  restrained  from  doing  so. 
M.  de  Corday  silenced  his  son,  and  Marie 
pulled  M.  de  Tourn^lis  to  the  back  of  the 
room. 

"  How  is  it,"  said  she  to  the  imprudent  gen- 
tleman, whose  arm  she  still  held,  "  how  is  it 
that  you  are  not  afraid  of  risking  the  lives  of 
those  about  you  by  your  intemperate  manifesta- 
tions ?  If  you  would  serve  your  country  so, 
you  had  far  better  not  go  away." 

"  And  why,  mademoiselle,"  he  returned  im- 
petuously, "  why  did  you  not  just  now  fear  to 
wound  the  feelings  of  your  friends  by  refusing 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  13 

to  join  your  voice  to  a  toast  so  French,  and  so 
dear  to  all  of  us  ? " 

"  My  refusal,"  she  replied,  smiling,  "  can 
only  injure  me.  But  you,  without  any  use- 
ful end,  would  risk  the  lives  of  all  about  you. 
On  whose  side,  tell  me,  is  the  most  generous 
sentiment  ? " 

My  refusal  can  only  injure  me.  Springing, 
perhaps,  at  first,  from  her  solitary  meditations  ; 
growing  daily  as  she  daily  learns  new  details  of 
the  excesses  of  the  time,  for  during  a  two 
years'  space,  she  reads  some  five  hundred  pam- 
phlets ;  fortified  by  the  indignant  protest  which 
"  her  master,"  Raynal,  addressed  to  the  Con- 
stituent Assembly,  —  the  ruling  idea  of  Marie  de 
Corday  had  become  a  complete  detachment 
from  her  individual  existence,  — a  desire  to  offer 
up  her  life,  if  her  life  could  be  useful  to  her 
country.  "  What  fate  awaits  us  t  "  writes  she 
to  Madame  de  Maromme.  *'  A  frightful  des- 
potism. If  they  succeed  in  curbing  the  people, 
'  tis  to  fall  from  Charybdis  into  Scylla ;  on 
every  side  we  suffer.  .  .  .  One  can  die  but 
once  ;  and  what  consoles  me  for  the  horror  of 
our  situation,  is  that  no  one  will  lose  in  losing 
me.''  Later,  writing  to  Mile.  Rose  Fougeron 
du  Fayot  of  this  terrible  news  of  the  king's 
death  (179}),  she  says  that  if  she  could,  she 


14  Four  Frenchwmnen. 

would  fly  to  England.  "  But,"  she  adds, 
"  God  holds  us  here  for  other  destinies."  The 
idea  was  there,  without  the  name.  The  arrival 
of  the  proscribed  Girondists  at  Caen  found  her 
ripe  for  the  execution  of  her  scheme. 

The  struggle  between  the  Mountain  and  the 
Gironde  had  drawn  to  the  close.  The  Monta- 
gnards  had  accused  the  Girondists  of  conniving 
with  the  foreigner.  Guadet  had  replied  by  a 
counter-charge  against  Marat,  and  Marat  was 
sent  to  that  revolutionary  tribunal  which  he 
himself  had  instituted.  Judges  and  jury  rose 
en  masse,  and,  without  more  to-do,  declared 
him  innocent.  A  mob  formed  on  the  spot 
crowned  him  with  oak,  and,  led  by  a  sapper 
named  Rocher,  brandishing  his  axe,  carried  him 
on  their  shoulders  to  the  Convention,  before 
which  they  defiled,  according  to  custom,  subse- 
quently dancing  the  carmagnole,  deputies,  sap- 
per, and  all.  This  triumph  of  Marat  was  the 
death-knell  of  the  Gironde.  Soon  after,  the 
twenty-two  deputies  were  proscribed,  and 
some  eighteen  of  them  took  refuge  at  Caen. 

The  arrival  of  the  discarded  senators  was 
hailed  with  enthusiasm  by  Marie  de  Corday. 
These  were  republicans  after  her  own  heart,  — 
latter-day  Romans,  disciples  of  Brutus.  They 
would  save  the  country  from  its  miserable  assas- 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  15 

sins,  restore  the  peace  of  which  she  dreamed. 
The  petition  of  a  friend  lent  her  a  pretext  for 
introducing  herself  to  Barbaroux.  With  the 
"  Antinoiis  of  Marseilles  "  (grown  at  this  time 
excessively  fat  and  cumbrous,  by  the  way)  she 
had  numerous  interviews,  lengthy  discussions 
upon  the  position  of  affairs.  It  is  probable  that 
in  these  last  her  project  took  its  definite  shape. 
The  Girondist  orator  painted  to  her,  as  he  well 
knew  how  to  do,  that  sanguinary  Montagnard 
triumvirate,  —  the  remorseless  and  terrible  Dan- 
ton  ;  Robespierre,  cunning  as  a  Bengalee,  cruel 
as  a  tiger  ;  Marat,  the  jackal  of  the  guillotine, 
nauseous,  ignoble,  and  drunk  with  blood,  — 
Marat,  too,  who  had  compassed  their  downfall. 
Mile,  de  Corday's  choice  was  made.  That 
choice,  however,  she  kept  a  secret.  All  knowl- 
edge of  her  intent  was  subsequently  strenuously 
denied  by  the  deputies  who  knew  her  while 
at  Caen. 

The  Girondists  had  hoped  to  organise  a 
counter-revolution,  —  to  form  a  departmental 
army  to  march  upon  Paris,  and  insure  the  safety 
of  the  Convention  ;  but  the  business  languished. 
*'  Unwearied  orators,  incorrigible  Utopists,"  in- 
consequent democrats,  —  they  were  voices,  and 
nothing  more.  Puisaye  had  gathered  two  thou- 
sand men  at  Evreux  ;  Wimpffen  called  for  the 


1 6  Four  Frenchwomen, 

volunteers  at  Caen.  Seventeen  men  quitted  the 
ranks.  The  sight  of  this  devoted  little  band 
only  served  to  strengthen  the  purpose  of  Mile, 
de  Corday.  "  A  woman's  hand  should  check 
the  civil  war,"  she  said  ;  "a  woman's  hand 
prepare  the  peace.''''  She  had  already  procured 
a  passport  for  Paris,  already  bade  adieu  to  her 
friends,  and  two  days  after,  she  left  for  the 
capital. 

None,  we  say,  knew  of  her  intent.  Her  os- 
tensible purpose  was  the  serving  of  an  old  con- 
vent friend,  for  whom  Barbaroux  had  interested 
himself.  Long  after  her  death,  little  anecdotes 
cropped  up  which  show  her  inflexible  decision. 
Passing  through  the  shop  of  the  carpenter  Lu- 
nel,  on  the  ground-floor  of  the  Grand  Manoir, 
she  suddenly,  to  the  astonishment  of  the  good 
man,  who  was  playing  cards  with  his  wife,  broke 
out  into  an  involuntary  "  No  ;  it  shall  be  never 
said  that  a  Marat  reigned  over  France  1  "  and 
struck  the  table  sharply  with  her  hand.  Her 
books  she  distributed,  keeping  perhaps  an  odd 
volume  of  Plutarch  out  of  all.  To  the  carpen- 
ter's son,  Louis  Lunel,  she  gave  her  portfolio 
and  her  crayon-holder,  bidding  him  not  to  for- 
get her,  as  he  would  never  see  her  more.  "When 
saying  good-bye  to  one  of  her  friends,  she 
kissed  the  son,  a  boy  of  sixteen  or  thereabouts. 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  17 

M.  Malfilatre  grew  up  to  be  a  man  ;  and  when 
he  died,  as  late  as  1851,  he  still  remembered 
with  pride  the  last  kiss  that  Marie  de  Corday 
ever  gave  on  earth. 

Then  comes  the  anecdote  of  M.  de  Lamar- 
tine,  which  is  at  least  ben  irovato.  Fronting 
the  Grand  Manoir  lodged  a  family  named  La- 
couture.  The  son  of  the  house,  a  skilful  musi- 
cian, was  used  to  practise  regularly  in  the 
mornings  at  his  piano.  He  had  noticed  that 
whenever  he  began  to  play,  his  opposite  neigh- 
bour thrust  open  her  shutters,  and  sat  some- 
times half-hidden  by  the  curtain,  and  apparently 
listening  to  the  music.  Encouraged  by  the  daily 
apparition  of  the  lady,  the  musician  never  failed 
to  play,  —  Marie  never  to  fling  open  the  shut- 
ters. This  went  on  regularly  up  to  the  day 
which  preceded  her  departure  for  Paris.  That 
day  she  opened,  then  closed  the  shutters  sud- 
denly and  sharply.  On  the  morrow,  they  re- 
mained obstinately  shut.  Slowly  the  notes  stole 
out  upon  the  air,  but  the  dark  casement  showed 
no  sign.  Thus  the  musician  knew  that  his  lis- 
tener was  gone. 


Four  Frenchwomen. 


III. 


There  are  two  trustworthy  portraits  of  Mile, 
de  Corday.  The  one,  attributed  to  Siccardi,  and 
preserved  at  Caen,  represents  a  magnificent 
young  woman  of  three-and-twenty,  in  all  the 
exuberance,  all  the  omnipotence  of  youth  and 
beauty,  —  strong  and  yet  graceful,  elegantly 
natural,  modest  above  all,  and  still  of  a  com- 
pelling presence.  Her  hair,  of  a  beautiful 
chestnut  tinge,  escapes  from  the  fluttering  laces 
of  her  Norman  cap,  and  falls  in  torrents  on  the 
white,  close-drawn  kerchief  about  her  shoulders. 
Her  eyes  were  grey  and  somewhat  sad,  shaded 
by  deep,  dark  lashes.  Her  brows  were  finely 
arched,  her  face  "  a  perfect  oval,"  and'her  com- 
plexion *'  marvellously  brilliant."  "  She  blushed 
very  readily,  and  became  then,  in  reality,  charm- 
ing." Add  to  these  a  strangely  musical  voice, 
singularly  silvery  and  childlike,  and  an  expres- 
sion of  "  ineffable  sweetness,"  and  you  may 
conceive  something  of  that  Marie  de  Corday 
whom  men  loved  at  Caen. 

The  other,  painted  by  Hauer  in  her  cell,  and 
wearing  originally  the  red  shirt  of  the  mur- 
deress, is  that  Charlotte  Corday  of  the  Con- 
ciergerie  whom  death  is  nearing  quickly,  stride 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day  19 

on  stride.  White-robed,  white-capped,' the  fig- 
ure is  peaceful,  statuesque,  and  calm.  Some- 
thing, perhaps,  of  severity  sits  upon  the  feat- 
ures ;  something,  perhaps,  of  sorrow  in  the  eyes. 
Not  sorrow  for  the  deed  ;  rather  the  shadow 
of  her  long-nursed  purpose,  —  the  shadow  of 
those  long,  lonely  hours  in  the  Grand  Manoir  ; 
the  shadow  of  that  loveless,  hopeless,  end- 
less woman's  life  she  values  at  so  little.  For 
herself  she  is  perfectly  at  ease.  Her  duty 
done,  what  remains  the  rest  may  do.  She  has 
prepared  the  peace.  She  had  done  "  a  thing 
which  should  go  throughout  all  generations  to  the 
children  of  the  nation.'' 

Peace  —  "  the  Peace  "  —  is  her  paramount 
idea.  Her  famous  letter,  written  ostensibly  to 
Barbaroux,  but  in  reality  her  political  Apologia, 
is  dated  the  Second  day  of  the  Preparation  for 
Peace,  "  Peace  at  all  price,"  she  writes,  *'  must 
be  procured."  "  For  the  last  two  days  she  has 
enjoyed  a  delicious  peace.'"  There  is  a  certain 
forced  gaiety  —  a  calculated  flippancy  —  an  af- 
fectation of  stoicism  about  this  manifesto  which 
is  well-nigh  painful.  Yet  she  cannot  wholly  dis- 
guise the  elevation  of  the  heroine,  who  feels  "  no 
fear  of  death,"  who  "  values  life  only  as  it  can 
be  useful  to  her  kind."  This  letter,  begun  at  the 
Abbaye,  finished  at  the  Conciergerie,  was  never 


20  Four  Frenchwomen. 

delivered.    In  far  simpler  and  far  more  touching 
words  she  takes  leave  of  her  father :  — 

Pardonnis-moi  mon  Cher  papa  (Vavoir  disposd 
de  mon  Existance  sans  votre  permission,  Jai  vengi 
bien  d'innocentes  victimes,  jai  prevenu  bien  d'au- 
tres  ddsastres,  le  peuple  un  jour  desabus4,  se  re- 
jouira  ditre  delivrd  d'un  tyrran,  Si  j'ai  cherchi  a 
vous  persuadd  que  je  passais  en  angleterre,  cesque 
jesperais  garder  lincognito  mais  jen  ai  reconu 
limpossibilite.  Jespere  que  vous  ne  seris  point 
tourmente  en  tous  cas  je  crois  que  vous  auriis  des 
defenseurs  a  Caen,  jai  pris  pour  defenseur  Gus- 
tave  Doulcet,  un  tel  attentat  ne  permet  nulle  de- 
fense Cest  pour  la  forme,  adieu  mon  Cher  papa 
je  vous  prie  de  moublier,  ou  plutdt  de  vous  rejouir 
de  mon  sort  la  cause  en  est  belle,  Temhrasse  ma 
saeur  que  jaime  de  tout  mon  coeur  ainsi  qui  tous 
mes  parens,  n'oublids  pas  ce  vers  de  Corneille. 
"  Le  crime  fait  la  honte  et  non  pas  T^chafaud." 

Cest  demain  a  huit  heures  que  Von  me  juge, 
ce  1 6  Juillet. 

CORDAY. 

Corde  et  ore  was  the  motto  of  the  Armont 
family.  Corde  et  ore  before  the  dark  bench  of 
the  Salle  de  I'Egalit^,  she  sustained  the  deed 
that  she  had  done.  Impossible  for  the  legal 
catches  of  President  Montana  to  surprise  any 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  21 

avowal  of  complicity.  Answer  after  answer 
comes  from  her,  prompt,  to  the  point,  clear- 
stamped  with  the  image  of  truth,  concise  as  a 
couplet  of  Corneille.  Like  Judith  of  old,  "  all 
marvelled  at  the  beauty  of  her  countenance." 
The  musical  voice  seemed  to  dominate  the  as- 
sembly, —  the  criminal  to  sit  in  judgment  on  her 
judges.  She  had  killed  Marat  for  his  crimes,  — 
the  miseries  that  he  had  caused.  The  thought 
was  hers  alone  ;  her  hatred  was  enough  ;  she 
best  could  execute  her  project.  She  has  killed 
one  man  to  save  a  thousand  ;  a  villain  to  save 
innocents ;  a  savage  wild  beast  to  give  her 
country  Peace.  "  Do  you  think,  then,  to  have 
killed  all  the  Marats  ?  "  "  This  one  dead,  the 
rest  will  fear  —  perhaps."  "  You  should  be 
skilful  at  the  work,"  says  crafty  Fouquier-Tin- 
ville,  remarking  on  the  sureness  of  the  stroke. 
"  The  monster  !  He  takes  me  for  an  assassin  !  " 
Her  answer  closed  the  debates  like  a  sudden 
clap  of  thunder.  The  reading  of  her  letters 
followed.  "  Have  you  anything  to  add?" 
says  Montane^,  as  the  one  to  Barbaroux  was 
finished.  *'  Set  down  this,"  she  returned  : 
"  The  leader  of  anarchy  is  no  more  ;  you 
will  have  peace/'  Nothing  was  left  but  to 
demand  her  head,  which  the  public  accuser 
did  at  once. 


22  Four  Frenchwomen, 

The  form  of  a  defence  was  gone  through. 
She  had  called  upon  a  friend  —  the  M.  Doulcet 
of  the  letter  to  her  father ;  her  request  had 
never  reached  him.  Montand  named  Chau- 
veau  de  la  Garde.  But  she  had  confessed 
everything  :  there  was  nothing  to  say.  How 
could  he  please  her  best  ?  When  he  rose  a 
murmur  filled  the  room.  During  the  reading  of 
the  accusation,  the  judge  had  bid  him  plead 
madness,  the  jury  to  hold  his  tongue.  Either 
plan  was  contrived  to  humiliate  her.  La  Garde 
read  in  her  anxious  eyes  that  she  would  not  be 
excused.  Like  a  gallant  gentleman  as  he  was, 
he  took  his  perilous  cue.  "  The  accused,"  he 
said,  "  avows  her  crime,  acknowledges  its  long 
premeditation,  confesses  to  all  its  terrible  de- 
tails. This  immovable  calm,  this  entire  self- 
abnegation  —  in  some  respects  sublime  —  are  not 
in  nature.  They  are  only  to  be  explained  by 
that  exaltation  of  political  fanaticism  which  has 
placed  a  dagger  in  her  hand.  .  .  .  Gentlemen 
of  the  jury,  I  leave  your  decision  to  the  care 
of  your  prudence." 

The  face  of  the  prisoner  filled  with  pleasure. 
All  fear  of  that  dreadful  plea,  insanity,  was  at 
an  end.  She  heard  the  sentence  unmoved, 
after  which  she  begged  the  gendarmes  to  lead 
her  to   La  Garde.     "  Monsieur,"  she  said,  "  I 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  23 

thank  you  warmly  for  the  courage  with  which 
you  have  defended  me,  in  a  manner  worthy  of 
yourself  and  of  me.  These  gentlemen "  — 
turning  to  the  judges  —  "confiscate  my  goods, 
but  I  will  give  you  a  greater  proof  of  my 
gratitude  :  I  ask  you  to  pay  my  prison  debts, 
and  I  count  upon  your  generosity."  It  need 
hardly  be  said  that  the  duty  was  religiously 
performed. 

During  the  trial  she  had  noticed  a  person 
sketching  her,  and  had  courteously  turned  her 
face  towards  him.  This  was  Jacques  Hauer, 
an  officer  of  the  National  Guard.  As  soon  as 
she  returned  to  the  prison,  she  expressed  to  the 
concierge  a  desire  to  see  him.  The  painter 
came.  She  offered  in  the  few  minutes  that  re- 
mained to  her  to  give  him  a  sitting,  begging 
him  at  the  same  time  to  copy  the  portrait  for 
her  friends,  calmly  talking  of  indifferent  matters, 
and  now  and  then  of  the  deed  that  she  had  done. 
One  hour,  then  half-an-hour,  passed  away  ;  the 
door  opened,  and  Sanson  appeared  with  the 
scissors  and  the  red  shirt.  "  What,  already?" 
she  asked.  She  cut  off  a  long  lock  of  her  beau- 
tiful hair  and  offered  it  to  Hauer,  saying  that 
she  had  nothing  else  to  give  him,  and  resigned 
the  rest  to  the  executioner.  Her  brilliant  com- 
plexion had  not  faded,  her  lips  were  red  as  ever. 


24  Four  Frenchwomen. 

She  still  "  enjoyed  a  delicious  peace."  The 
crimson  shirt  added  so  strangely  to  her  weird 
beauty  that  the  artist  put  it  in  the  picture  ;  but, 
as  we  have  said,  it  was  afterwards  painted  out. 
She  asked  Sanson  if  she  might  wear  her  gloves, 
showing  her  wrist  bruised  by  the  brutal  way  in 
which  they  had  tied  her  hands.  He  told  her 
that  he  could  arrange  it  without  giving  her  pain. 
"True,"  said  she,  gaily,  "they  have  not  all 
your  practice." 

The  cart  was  waiting  outside.  "When  she 
came  out  the  "  furies  of  the  guillotine  "  greeted 
her  with  a  howl  of  execration.  But  even  on 
these,  says  Klause,  a  look  of  the  wonderful  eyes 
often  imposed  a  sudden  silence.  Calmly  she 
mounted  the  tumbril,  and  the  horse  set  out  along 
the  road  it  knew  so  well.  Upright,  unmoved, 
and  smiling,  she  made  the  whole  of  the  journey. 
The  cart  got  on  but  slowly  through  the  dense- 
packed  crowd,  and  Sanson  heard  her  sigh. 
"You  find  it  a  long  journey?"  he  asked. 
"  Bah  !''  said  she,  serenely,  with  the  old  musical 
voice  unshaken,  "  we  are  sure  to  get  there 
at  last."  Sanson  stepped  in  front  of  her  as 
they  neared  the  scaffold,  to  hide  the  guillotine ; 
but  she  bent  before  him,  saying,  "  I  have  a 
good  right  to  be  curious,  for  I  have  never 
seen  one." 


Mademoiselle  de  Cor  day.  25 

The  red  sun  dipped  down  behind  the  Champs 
Elys^es  trees  as  she  went  up  the  steps.  The 
blood  rushed  to  her  cheek  ;  the  covering  on  her 
neck  was  roughly  torn  away,  and  for  an  instant 
she  stood  in  the  ruddy  light  as  if  transfigured. 
Then,  in  a  solemn  silence,  the  axe  fell.  A  hound 
named  Legros  (a  temporary  aid  of  Sanson's) 
lifted  up  the  pale,  beautiful  head,  with  all  its 
frozen  sweetness,  and  struck  it  on  the  cheek. 
Report  says  that  it  reddened  to  the  blow.  But 
whether  it  really  blushed,  whether  the  wretch's 
hands  were  wet  with  blood,  or  whether  it  was 
an  effect  of  the  sunlight,  will  now  be  never 
known.  The  crowd,  by  an  almost  universal 
murmur,  testified  its  disapprobation.  So  died 
Marie  de  Corday,  aged  twenty-four  years, 
eleven  months,  and  twenty  days.  She  was 
buried  in  the  Madeleine,  and  afterwards  re- 
moved to  the  cemetery  Montparnasse. 

Inseparable  from  her  last  hours  is  the  figure 
of  the  Mentz  deputy  and  German  dreamer, 
Adam  Lux.  He  saw  her  on  the  way  to  the 
scaffold,  —  went  mad  at  the  splendid  sight, — 
grew  drunk  with  death.  He  courted  the  axe  ; 
it  was  glorious  to  die  with  her  —  for  her.  In  a 
long,  printed  eulogium,  he  proposed  that  she 
should  have  a  statue,  with  the  motto,  Greater 


26  Four  Frenchwomen. 

than  Bruius.  He  was  tried,  sent  to  the  scaf- 
fold, and  went  rejoicing,  crying  that  "  now,  at 
last,  he  should  die  for  the  sake  of  Charlotte 
Corday." 

But  although  the  Mentz  deputy  glorified  the 
heroine,  he  did  not  glorify  the  deed ;  nor  do  we. 
In  the  true  spirit  of  that  life-maker's  motto, 
to  '*  nothing  extenuate,  or  set  down  aught  in 
malice,"  we  are  bound  to  condemn  her  act. 
Many  a  voice  has  been  raised  in  defence  of 
political  assassination.  For  us,  the  knife  makes 
the  crime.  Has  it  not  been  written, — "Ven- 
geance is  mine,  saith  the  Lord  :  /  will  repay  "  ? 
The  sin  of  Marie  de  Corday  was  twofold  :  sin, 
as  the  shedding  of  blood  is  sin  ;  sin,  as  an  usur- 
pation of  the  Right  Divine  to  punish.  Nor  did 
the  result  justify  the  means.  The  Hydra- of  the 
Terror  had  other  heads  than  Marat's.  He,  in- 
deed, was  gone  ;  but  had  the  guillotine  no 
jackals  in  Fouquier-Tinville  and  Robespierre  ? 
Was  there  no  infamous  P^re  Duchesne  to  suc- 
ceed to  the  Ami  du  Peuple )  Enthusiasm  no 
doubt  existed,  but  for  her  alone.  Her  prepa- 
ration/or Peace  only  further  inflamed  the  Revo- 
lutionary Tribunal,  only  hurried  swifter  to  their 
doom  the  unfortunate  Twenty-two.  It  lifted 
Marat   into  a  bloody  martyrdom,    sent   to  the 


Mademoiselle  de  Corday.  27 

scaffold  an  unoffending  Lauze  de  Perret,  a  hap- 
less Adam  Lux.  Yet  while  our  colder  reasons 
condemn,  our  warmer  hearts  excuse.  We  are 
free,  granting  her  error,  to  forgive  its  mistaken 
motive,  free  to  admire  her  unselfish  devotion 
and  the   sublimity  of  her  end. 


MADAME    ROLAND. 
1754-1793- 


"  Une  femme  qui  itait  tin  grand  hotnmc\" 

Louis  Blanc. 

"  Elle  avait  Tame  republicaine  dans  un 
corps  petri  de  graces  et  fa9onne  par 
une  certaine  politesse  de  cour." 

RiouFFE.    Mcmoires  cPun  Detenu. 


MADAME    ROLAND. 
I. 

TN  the  fall  of  1863,  a  young  man  called  upon 
-*■  a  bookseller  of  the  Quai  Voltaire  with  a 
bundle  of  dusty  documents  under  his  arm. 
"  They  had  been  his  father's  ;  they  were  noth- 
ing to  him  :  what  would  Monsieur  give  for 
them  ? "  Monsieur,  looking  over  them,  does 
not  think  them  very  interesting,  and  declines 
to  bid  for  the  treasure.  "  But,"  says  the  young 
man,  "  there  are  others,"  and  on  two  successive 
occasions  he  appears  with  more  yellow  manu- 
scripts. Finally  the  bookseller  offers  fifty 
francs  for  the  whole.  "  Fifty  francs  be  it, 
then  !  "  And  the  heaps  being  shaken,  sorted, 
and  arranged,  are  found  to  include  memoirs 
of  the  Girondists  Louvet  and  Potion  ;  auto- 
graph of  the  Girondist  Buzot ;  tragedy  of 
Charlotte  Corday,  by  the  Girondist  Salles  ; 
and,  best  of  all.  Jive  letters  of  the  famous 
Madame  Roland. 

Stranger  still,  this  discovery  was  closely 
connected  with  another  made  some  months  be- 
fore, in  March.     A  savant,  well  known  for  his 


32  Four  Frenchwomen. 

revolutionary  researches,  prowling  about  in  the 
market  at  Batignolles,  had  happened  upon  the 
miniature  of  a  man,  in  sad  dilapidation,  and 
dragging  on  the  ground  among  a  heap  of  vege- 
tables. Its  glass  had  gone,  its  canvas  had  curled 
and  cracked  ;  but  behind  the  picture  was  a  piece 
of  folded  paper,  cut  to  the  size  of  the  portrait, 
and  covered  closely  with  Madame  Roland's 
well-known  writing.  These  two  discoveries, 
taken  in  connection  with  each  other,  clasped 
at  once  the  hands  of  two  hitherto  unrecognised 
lovers,  and  settled  forever  a  question  which  had 
been  often  asked,  but  never  answered  until 
then. 

Love  in  the  earlier  years  of  Madame  Roland 
had  assumed  a  curious  disguise.  He  had  ap- 
peared to  her  in  the  cap  and  gown  of  a  school- 
man, and  had  left  his  heart  behind  in  the  hurry 
of  packing.  Self-educated  and  secluded,  she 
had  ranged  all  literature,  learning  to  read  in 
Plutarch,  graduating  in  Rousseau, — and  both 
had  left  their  marks.  Handsome,  ardent,  af- 
fectionate, and  sensitive,  she  had,  nevertheless, 
listened  to  the  voice  of  her  imagination  and  the 
echoes  of  her  studies  until  she  had  forgotten 
her  feelings.  Love  for  her  had  become  a  mat- 
ter of  stoical  calculation  ;  marriage  a  prudent 
philosophical   bargain,   to   be   controlled   by  a 


Madame  Roland.  33 

maxim  of  the  Portico,  a  quotation  from  Emile. 
At  twenty-five  she  had  married  —  always  en  phi- 
losophe  —  a  staid,  stiff  man  of  five-and-forty,  an 
inspector  of  manufactures  at  Lyons,  who  be 
came  a  minister  at  Paris,  and  scandalised  thQ 
court  by  his  Puritan  costume,  his  round  hat, 
and  the  strings  in  his  shoes.  Him  she  had 
aided,  elevated,  and  afterwards  eclipsed. 
Thrown  suddenly  into  society,  then  queen  of 
a  coterie  of  young  and  eloquent  enthusiasts, 
dreaming  dangerously  of  being  "  the  happiness 
of  one  and  the  bond  of  many,"  she  had  early 
discovered  that  "  among  those  around  her  there 
were  some  men  whom  she  might  love  ;  "  and  al- 
though she  strictly  obeyed  the  dictates  of  duty, 
it  was  shrewdly  suspected  that  the  some  one 
had  been  found.  Who  was  it  ?  Who  was  the 
^^  loi  que  je  nose  nommer'^  of  her  memoirs? 
What  passion  was  this  from  which  her  riper 
years  so  narrowly  escaped  ?  Michelet  and 
Sainte-Beuve  had  touched  the  traces  of  a 
hardly-conquered  inclination  for  Bancal  des  Is- 
sarts.  But  who  could  it  be  ?  Was  it  Barba- 
roux,  the  "  Antinoiis  of  Marseilles?"  Was  it 
Bosc  the  devoted,  Lanthenas  the  friend  of  the 
family  ?  Was  it  Buzot  ?  It  iras  Buzot.  The 
letters  were  to  Buzot,  the  portrait  was  Buzot's, 
and  the  riddle  was  solved.  Already  clearly 
3 


34  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

drawn  by  her  own  faithful  pencil,  the  great 
truth-teller  Time  had  added  the  completing 
touches.  No  longer  darkly  seen,  the  stately 
figure  stands  out  upon  the  threshold  of  the 
Revolution,  secure  in  its  singular  nobility,  with 
all  its  errors  undisguised,  and  makes  "  appeal 
to  impartial  posterity." 

When,  in  Moli^re's  play,  the  learned  (and  in- 
tolerable) M.  Thomas  Diafoirus  pays  his  court 
to  Mile.  Ang^lique,  he  politely  presents  her 
with  an  elaborate  thesis  against  the  circulation 
of  the  blood,  pour  /aire  son  chemin.  In  1790 
the  successful  suitor  came  laden  with  the  Con- 
irai  Social  in  his  pocket,  or  to-morrow's  decla- 
mation in  his  hand.  On  that  high  road  to  ladies' 
favour  the  surest  passport  was  some  florid  phi- 
lippic against  Robespierre  or  Marat,  some 
high-pitched  prospectus  of  the  approaching 
"  Reign  of  Reason."  Politics  had  invaded 
all  the  salons,  driving  before  them  the  sonnets 
and  bouts-rimds,  effacing  the  dclat  of  the  Dorats 
and  Bernis.  From  the  crowded  court  where 
Madame  de  Stael  swayed  the  sceptre,  to  its 
faintest  provincial  copy,  whose  "  inferior  priest- 
ess "  fired  her  friends  with  her  enthusiasm  and 
burnt  her  fingers  with  her  tea,  the  political  spirit 
had  swept  down  all  before  it. 

Arrived    in    the    capital    in    1791,   Madame 


Madame  Roland.  35 

Roland,  already  in  her  Lyons  retreat  a  decided 
republican,  already  a  contributor  to  the  patriot 
journal  of  her  friend  Champagneux,  already  in 
correspondence  with  the  all-pervading  Brissot, 
flung  herself  headlong  into  the  popular  current. 
Her  house  at  Paris  became  a  rendezvous  for 
Brissot's  friends.  The  elegant  hostess,  who, 
silent  at  first  in  the  animated  discussions,  only 
showed  her  scorn  or  her  sympathy  by  a  sudden 
elevation  of  the  brows,  a  glance  of  the  speak- 
ing eyes,  became  the  *'  Egeria"  of  the  gath- 
ering Gironde.  The  little  third-floor  of  the 
Hotel  Britannique,  Rue  Guen^gaud,  became 
a  very  grotto  of  the  Camena?.  Round  her  — 
centre  and  soul  of  the  coalition  —  flocked  its 
famous  and  ill-fated  leaders.  Here  nightly  was 
to  be  seen  that  journalist  adventurer  Brissot,  its 
hand  as  she  was  its  head  ;  here,  too,  came  the 
unknown  lover  Buzot,  "  heart  of  fire  and  soul 
of  iron,"  drinking  a  perilous  eloquence  in  those 
beautiful  eyes  ;  here,  too,  even  Danton,  even 
Robespierre,  made  fitful  apparitions,  and,  con- 
spicuous among  the  rest,  might  be  distinguished 
the  "grave"  Petion,  the  philosopher  Condor- 
cet,  and  last  but  not  least,  her  husband,  the 
*'  virtuous  "  Roland. 

Hardly  to  be   detached,  therefore,  from   the 
story  of  the  Girondists,  are  the  later  years  of 


36  Four  Frenchwomen. 

Madame  Roland's  life.  But  our  concern,  at 
present,  lies  more  with  the  woman  than  the 
politician — more  with  Marie-Jeanne,  or  Manon 
Phlipon  the  engraver's  daughter,  than  the  all- 
conquering  wife  of  the  popular  statesman.  His- 
torically, perhaps,  a  few  words  are  necessary. 
First  a  commissioner  to  the  National  Assembly 
(1791),  then  Minister  of  the  Interior  under 
Dumouriez  (1792),  Roland  was  materially  in- 
fluenced, ably  aided,  by  his  wife.  When  Louis 
XVI.  refused  to  sanction  the  decree  for  the 
banishment  of  the  priests,  the  minister,  using 
his  wife's  pen,  addressed  to  the  king  a  remon- 
strance which  procured  his  dismissal. 

The  Faubourg  St.  Antoine  rose,  the  king  was 
removed  to  the  Temple,  and  Roland  was  re- 
called. Loudly  and  ineffectually  he  .protested 
against  the  savage  September  massacres  in  the 
prisons.  Then  the  pair  became  objects  for  the 
enmity  of  the  terrible  Montagne.  Madame 
Roland  was  charged  with  corresponding  with 
England.  The  address  and  dexterity  of  her 
defence  baffled  her  opponents,  Danton  and  Ro- 
bespierre. At  last  Roland  was  arrested,  but 
escaped.  His  wife  was  thrown  into  the  Abbaye, 
liberated,  re-arrested,  and  taken  to  St.  Pelagie  ; 
thence  to  the  Conciergerie,  and  thence,  on 
November  8th,  1793,  to  the  guillotine. 


Madame  Roland.  37 

During  her  imprisonment  she  wrote  her  per- 
sonal memoirs  (which  she  was  not  able  to  com- 
plete), Notices  Historiques  of  her  political  circle, 
Porlrails  et  Anecdotes,  and  the  five  letters  to 
Buzot  which  have  already  been  mentioned. 


II. 


There  are  many  reasons  which  render  these 
"  confidences,"  as  they  have  been  called,  singu- 
larly genuine  and  authentic.  Like  many  of  the 
records  of  that  time,  they  were  written  under 
the  axe.  At  such  a  moment,  to  palter  with  pos- 
terity —  to  mince  and  simper  to  the  future  — 
were  worse  than  useless.  With  the  beautiful 
Duchess  of  Gramont,  who  was  asked  whether 
she  had  helped  the  emigrants,  the  authors  seem 
to  say,  "  I  was  going  to  answer  '  No,'  but  life 
is  not  worth  the  lie."  And  one  and  all,  writing 
in  the  shadow  of  death,  catch  something  of 
sublime  simplicity.  In  the  present  case  there 
are  other  reasons  still.  When  Madame  Roland 
planned  her  memoirs  she  was  thinking  of  the 
greatest  work  of  her  great  model,  Rousseau. 
"  These,"  she  said  to  a  friend,  "  will  be  nz^ 
'  Confessions,'  for  I  shall  conceal  nothing."  A 
mistaken  idea,  perhaps,  but  one  which  lends  an 


38  Four  Frenchwomen. 

additional  value  to  the  words.  Lastly,  we  have 
in  them  the  first  rapidly-conceived  expression, 
the  accent,  as  it  were,  of  her  soul.  As  she 
hurries  on,  driven  by  inexorable  haste,  now,  at 
some  prison  news,  breaking  into  a  patriotic  de- 
fence of  her  defeated  party,  now  again  seeking 
peace  in  the  half-light  of  her  childish  memories, 
now  listening  to  the  supper-table  clamour  of 
the  actresses  in  the  next  cell,  now  in  a  sudden 
panic  tearing  oflF  the  completed  MS.  to  send  to 
Bosc,  who  will  hide  it  in  a  rock  in  the  forest  of 
Montmorency,  one  experiences  all  the  charm  of 
an  intimate  conversation  ;  one  feels  that  these 
papers  are,  so  to  speak,  proof  impressions  of 
her  state  of  mind.  Composed  with  all  the  easy 
fluency  and  something  of  the  naive  cultivation 
of  S6vign6,  they  were  scribbled  furtively,  under 
the  eye  of  a  gaoler,  on  coarse  grey  paper  pro- 
cured by  the  favour  of  a  turnkey,  and  often 
blotted  with  her  tears.  The  large  quarto  vol- 
ume of  MSS.  is  still  in  existence.  Its  fine  bold 
writing  is  hardly  corrected,  never  retouched. 
The  writer  had  no  time  for  erasure,  revision,  or 
ornament,  and  barely  time  to  tell  the  truth. 

Manon  Phlipon  hardly  recollects  when  she 
first  learned  to  read.  But  from  the  age  of  four 
she  reads  with  excessive  avidity,  devouring  every- 
thing with  a  perfect  rage  for  study.     Rising  at 


Madame  Roland.  39 

five,  when  all  is  quiet  in  the  house,  she  slips  on 
her  little  jacket,  and  steals  on  tiptoe  to  the  table 
in  the  corner  of  her  mother's  room,  there  to  re- 
peat and  prepare  her  lessons  for  the  patient  mas- 
ter whom  she  nicknamed  M.  Doucel.  She  is 
never  without  a  book.  Now  it  is  the  Bible,  or 
the  Lives  of  the  Saints ;  now  Telemachus,  or 
the  Memoirs  of  Mile,  de  Montpensicr  ;  now  the 
Recovery  of  Jerusalem,  or  the  Roman  Comique 
of  Scarron.  Tasso  and  Fenelon  set  the  child- 
brain  on  fire ;  as  she  reads  she  realises.  "  I 
was  Erminia  for  Tancred,  and  Eucharis  for  Te- 
lemachus." Plutarch  so  captivated  her  at  nine 
that  she  carried  him  to  church  instead  of  mass- 
book.  Nothing  is  too  drj'  ;  "  she  would  have 
learnt  the  Koran  by  heart  if  they  had  taught 
her  to  read  it  ;  "  she  astonishes  her  father  by 
her  knowledge  of  heraldry ;  even  tries  the  Law 
of  Contracts  ;  and.  later  still,  sets  to  and  copies 
out  a  treatise  on  geometry  —  plates  and  all. 

Nor  was  this  one  of  the  pale  little  prodigies 
whose  intellect  has  been  developed  at  the  ex- 
pense of  their  physique.  Manon  had  excellent 
health,  and  these  are  not  all  her  accomplish- 
ments. This  child,  who  read  serious  books, 
explained  the  circles  of  the  celestial  sphere, 
handled  crayon  and  burin,  and  was  at  eight  the 
best  dancer  in  a  party  of  children   older  than 


40  Four  Frenchwomen. 

herself — this  child  was  quite  at  home  in  the 
kitchen.  "  I  should  be  able  to  make  my  soup 
as  easily  as  Philopoemen  [in  her  favourite  Plu- 
tarch] cut  his  wood  ;  but  no  one  would  imagine 
that  it  was  a  duty  fitted  for  me  to  perform." 
There  is  a  secret  in  that  last  sentence  which 
may  be  safely  recommended  to  housekeepers 
in  posse. 

In  those  days,  perhaps  more  than  now,  a  first 
communion  was  a  great  event  in  a  child's  life. 
At  eleven  years  of  age  her  religious  studies  have 
so  mastered  her,  that  with  tears  in  her  eyes  she 
begs  her  parents  "to  do  a  thing  which  her  con- 
science demands,  to  place  her  in  a  convent,"  in 
order  to  prepare  for  it.  It  is  all  here.  She  has 
charmingly  painted  her  convent  friends  —  the 
colombe  gemissante.  Sister  Agatha,  the  Sisters 
Henriette  and  Sophie  Cannet  (her  correspon- 
dence with  whom  —  from  1772  to  1786  —  is 
*'  the  origin  of  her  taste  for  writing"),  the  con- 
vent life,  a  fdCf  and  the  installation  of  a  novice. 

With  the  Dames  de  la  Congrdgation  she  stayed 
a  year.  A  succeeding  year  was  spent  with  her 
grandmother  in  the  He  St.  Louis.  The  little 
household  is  pleasantly  touched  in  ;  her  grand- 
mother—  brisk,  amiable,  and  young  at  sixty- 
five  ;  her  grandmother's  sister,  Mademoiselle 
Rotisset,    pious,    asthmatic,    always    seriously 


Madame  Roland,  41 

knitting,  and  everybody's  servant.  Then  she 
describes  her  visit  to  a  great  lady,  whose  airs 
and  patronage  disgust  the  httle  republican  who 
has  already  begun  to  reason  shrewdly  upon 
nobility  of  intellect  and  questions  of  degree. 

"  '  Eh!  bonjour,'  said  Madame  de  Boismorel 
in  a  loud,  cold  voice,  and  rising  at  our  approach. 
^  Bon  jour,  Mademoiselle  Rotisset.'  (Mademoi- 
selle ?  What !  My  bonne  maman  is  here  Ma- 
demoiselle r)  'Well,  I  am  glad  to  see  you; 
and  this  pretty  child  is  your  grandchild,  eh  ? 
Ah,  she  will  improve.  Come  here,  mon  cceur 
—  here,  next  me.  She  is  timid.  How  old  is 
she,  your  grandchild,  Mademoiselle  Rotisset  ? 
She  Is  a  little  dark,  but  the  base  of  the  skin  is 
excellent ;  't  will  clear  before  long.  She  's  al- 
ready well  shaped.  You  should  have  a  lucky 
hand,  little  woman  ;  have  you  ever  put  into  the 
lottery  ? ' 

"  '  Never,  madame  ;  I  don't  like  games  of 
chance.' 

"  '  I  believe  you  ;  at  your  age  one  expects 
to  be  certain.  What  a  voice  !  how  sweet  and 
full  it  is  !  But  how  grave  we  are  1  Are  n't  you 
a  wee  bit  devote  ) ' 

"  '  I  know  my  duties,  and  I  try  to  fulfil  them.' 

"  '  Capital !  You  want  to  be  a  nun,  don't 
you  r ' 


42  Four  Frenchwomen. 

*'  '  I  ignore  my  destiny ;  I  don't  yet  seek  to 
determine  it.' 

"  '  Bless  me,  how  sententious  1  She  reads, 
your  grandchild,   Mademoiselle  Rotisset?' 

"  '  It  is  her  greatest  pleasure  ;  she  reads  half 
the  day.' 

"  '  Oh,  one  can  see  that  ;  but  take  care  that 
she  does  n't  become  a  blue-stocking  —  't  would 
be  a  thousand  pities.'  " 

Thereupon  the  elder  ladies  fell  to  talking  of 
their  little  maladies  —  of  Abbe  This  and  Coun- 
cillor That  —  and,  in  order  to  sprinkle  the 
sprightly  conversation  with  the  requisite  spice 
of  scandal,  of  a  certain  beauty  somewhat  "  on 
the  return,"  whose  misfortune  it  is  to  forget 
everything  except  her  age.  Meanwhile  Made- 
moiselle Manon,  perched  on  the  edge  of  her 
seat,  feels  very  hot  and  uncomfortable,  and 
sorely  disconcerted  by  the  cold  boldness  of  the 
great  lady's  eyes  which  stare  at  her  every  now 
and  then  over  her  plastered  cheeks.  The  proud 
little  student  of  Plutarch,  mutely  measuring  her- 
self with  her  entertainer,  sickens  at  her  patron- 
age and  assumption  of  superiority,  as  later  she 
will  sicken  at  "  that  lank  yellow  hackney,"  Ma- 
demoiselle de  Hannaches,  whose  pretensions  to 
pedigree  are  everywhere  respected  —  as  later 
she  will  sicken  at  the  obsequious  mummeries 


Madame  Roland.  43 

of  Versailles.  She  has  already  the  germ  of  all 
that  fierce  hatred  of  royalty  which  was  so  un- 
worthy of  her ;  and  although  in  the  memoirs 
she  has  doubtless  clothed  her  recollections  with 
something  of  the  amplitude  of  her  maturer  style, 
the  picture  in  feeling  is  vividly  true.  For  the 
Manon  of  the  visit  and  the  chronicler  of  later 
years  are  not  at  all  unlike.  Her  character  was 
of  a  composition  that  hardens  early,  and  be- 
tween the  child  of  twelve  and  the  woman  of 
forty  the  difference  is  not  so  great. 

When  at  last  she  returned  to  her  parents, 
Mademoiselle  Phlipon  was  a  handsome  girl  — 
well-nigh  a  woman.  She  has  no  plan  or  aim  but 
knowledge  and  instruction.  "  For  me  happi- 
ness consists  in  application."  "  The  mornings," 
she  writes  to  Sophie  Cannet,  "  slip  away  some- 
how in  reading  and  working.  After  meals  I  go 
into  my  little  study  overlooking  the  Seine.  I 
take  a  pen,  dream,  think,  and  write."  Else- 
where she  says,  "  My  violin,  my  guitar,  and 
my  pen  are  three  parts  of  my  life."  In  this  way, 
and  with  a  little  gardening,  the  quiet  days  glide 
on,  varied  only  by  a  Sunday  jaunt  to  lonely 
Meudon,  "  with  its  wild  woods  and  solitary 
pools,"  or  by  the  rarer  visit  to  friends. 

In  this  quiet  retirement  her  character  is  forming 
fast.     Doubt  begins  to  trouble  her.     Her  con- 


44  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

fessor,  somewhat  alarmed,  hastens  to  provide 
her  with  all  the  apologists  of  her  faith  ;  from 
these  she  learns  the  names  of  its  assailants,  and 
procures  them  too.  An  endless  course  !  Phi- 
losopher and  politician  —  Voltaire  and  Diderot, 
Descartes  and  Malebranche,  the  System  of  Na- 
ture and  the  Treatise  on  Tolerance  —  she  reads 
them  all.  She  writes,  too,  CEuvres  de  Loisir  and 
Divers  Reflections,  little  tracts  on  love  and  lib- 
erty. And  as  she  was  Eucharis  for  Telemachus, 
so  with  each  author  she  is  successively  —  per- 
haps all  at  once — Jansenist,  Cartesian,  Stoic, 
Deist,  and  Sceptic. 

Rousseau  comes  at  last  as  the  choice  dish  — 
the  peacock's  brains — of  this  mixed  entertain- 
ment. Nothing  but  the  Plutarch  at  nine  had 
captivated  her  like  Rousseau  at  twenty-one. 
She  has  "  found  her  fitting  food,"  she  says. 
"  A  little  Jean-Jacques  will  last  her  through  the 
night."  She  stigmatises  as  "  souls  of  mud  "  the 
women  who  can  read  the  Nouvelle  Hdloise  with- 
out at  least  ivishing  to  be  better.  Nor  was  she 
singular.  At  every  turn  of  these  Revolutionary 
records  one  traces  the  influence  of  the  Genevese 
philosopher.  Now  we  do  not  care  much  about 
that  pseudo-sentiment  —  for  us  the  windy  rhet- 
oric of  St.  Preux  is  simply  illegible  —  for  us 
Julie  (TEtanges  is  a  pricieuse  ridicule.     If  —  at 


Madame  Roland.  45 

all  —  we  remember  that  half-crazed  genius,  that 
self-indulgent,  "  self-torturing  sophist,"  it  is  as 
the  man  who  wrote  pathetically  of  paternity, 
and  sent  his  children  to  the  Foundling  —  as  the 
man  who  took  Vitam  impcndere  vero  for  his 
motto,  and  '•  romanced  "  like  Mendez  Pinto  — 
as  the  man  who  allov/ed  his  theft  of  a  paltry 
ribbon  to  ruin  a  poor  girl  who  loved  him,  and  so 
forth.  Yet  it  is  impossible  to  estimate  the  ex- 
tent of  his  power  over  his  contemporaries.  This 
opinion  of  Madame  Roland's  was  the  opinion 
of  Madame  de  Stael  —  of  nearly  all  the  world 
in  those  days  ;  and  to  this  influence  must  be 
attributed  the  somewhat  declamatory  style  of 
the  present  memoirs  ;  to  it,  also,  the  fact  that, 
excellent  as  they  are,  they  have  their  undesirable 
pages. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  the  handsome 
young  bourgeoise,  with  her  natural  graces,  and 
with  talents  far  above  her  class,  was  without  ad- 
mirers. "  All  the  youth  of  the  quarter,"  says 
she  pleasantly,  and  not  at  all  insensibly,  "passed 
in  review"  without  success.  Her  mother,  con- 
scious, perhaps,  of  her  approaching  end,  is  anx- 
ious to  see  her  daughter  settled.  Her  father 
wishes  to  marry  her  well,  from  a  pecuniary  point 
of  view,  and  thinks  of  little  else  ;  but  mademoi- 
selle has  her  own  model  of  male  humanity,  and 


46  Four  Frenchwomen. 

it  is  nol  the  neighbouring  butcher  in  his  Sunday 
coat  and  gala  lace.  "  Have  I  lived  with  Plu- 
tarch and  the  philosophers  simply  to  marry  a 
tradesman  with  whom  I  have  nothing  in  com- 
mon ?  "  Marriage  she  conceives  "  to  be  the 
most  intimate  union  of  hearts."  Her  husband 
must  excel  her.  Nature  and  the  law  give  him 
the  pre-eminence  ;  she  should  blush  if  he  did 
not  deserve  it.  Nevertheless  she  will  not  be 
commanded.  "  Ah  1  "  says  the  quiet  mother, 
"  you  would  conquer  a  man  who  did  your  will 
and  dreamt  it  was  his  own."  This  is,  perhaps, 
the  truth. 

She  has  painted  some  portraits  from  that  un- 
successful throng.  There  is  Monsieur  Mignard, 
"  the  Spanish  Colossus,  red-handed  as  Esau  ;  " 
Monsieur  Mozon,  the  widower,  with  the  wart  on 
his  cheek  ;  the  butcher  with  his  lace  ;  Monsieur 
Morizot  de  Rozain,  who  writes  d'asse^  belles 
choses,  and  gets  as  far  as  the  third  explanatory 
letter ;  La  Blancherie,  who  has  some  far-off 
touch  of  our  ideal,  upon  which  we  build  a  deal 
of  favour;  Gardanne,  whom  we  all  but  marry; 
and  a  host  who  are  not  placed  at  all  in  the  race 
for  this  young  lady's  hand. 

Every  now  and  then  comes  papa  with  "  some- 
thing new,"  as  he  terms  it,  and  mademoiselle 
sits  down  to  compose,  in  papa's  name,  a  polite 


Madame  Roland.  47 

little  refusal  in  the  usual  form  ;  and  when  at  last, 
and  not  at  all  in  a  hurry,  arrives  Monsieur  Ro- 
land de  la  Platiere,  savant  and  lilUrateur  — 
lean,  bald,  and  yellow  —  very  grave,  very  aus- 
tere—  "admiring  the  ancients  at  the  expense 
of  the  moderns  "  —  who  leaves  his  MSS.  in  her 
keeping,  and  who  endeavours  to  enliven  a  five 
years'  courtship  by  the  study  of  simple  equa- 
tions —  we  are  afraid  that  she  married  a  theory 
and  not  a  husband. 

"  Let  still  the  woman  take 
An  elder  than  herself :  so  wears  she  to  him, 
So  sways  she  level  in  her  husband's  heart." 

But  not  twenty  years  older,  surely  ?  Here, 
at  least,  the  model  union  was  not  happy.  In 
her  scheme  of  domestic  happiness  and  conjugal 
duties  she  had  ignored  one  ingredient,  and  that 
not  the  least  —  love.  For  her  own  peace  of 
mind  esteem  was  not  enough.  That  she  de- 
voted herself  to  Monsieur  Roland  —  that  he 
loved  her  with  an  ever-increasing  affection  — 
we  have  no  lack  of  words  to  prove  ;  but  we 
have  also  words  to  prove  that  Roland's  twenty 
years  of  seniority  and  naturally  dominant  tem- 
perament were  at  times  very  irksome  to  his 
wife.  As  she  perceived  this  feeling  growing 
she  became  more  and  more  obstinate  in  her 
"duty" — no   shadow   of    a   name   with   her. 


48  Four  Frenchwomen. 

She  earned  out  her  maxim,  "that  marriage  is 
an  association  of  two  individuals,  in  which  the 
woman  takes  charge  of  the  happiness  of  both," 
to  the  letter.  Her  husband,  growing  gradually 
querulous  and  infirm,  learned  to  depend  on  her 
for  everything,  and  she  wearied  of  the  thrall. 
Then,  too,  and  last  of  all,  comes  the  all-absorb- 
ing passion  —  for  another.  We  are  led  to  sup- 
pose that  Roland  knew  of  this.  Loving, 
sensitive,  he  saw  that  his  wife  was  sacrificing 
herself  to  him,  and  he  could  not  bear  it. 
"  Happiness,"  she  says,  "fled  from  us.  He 
adored  me,  I  gave  myself  up  to  him,  and  we 
were  miserable." 

How  shall  we  speak  of  this  terrible  love  that 
flamed  up  at  last  through  the  philosophic  crust 
—  that  beats  and  burns  in  every  line  pf  the 
letters  to  Buzot  i  Frankly,  we  wish  they  had 
never  been  discovered.  At  least,  we  know 
that  she  combated  it,  that  she  redoubled  her 
attention  to  her  husband,  and  we  find  her  wel- 
coming prison  with  the  prospect  of  death  as  the 
only  solution  of  the  struggle  between  her  pas- 
sion and  her  duty.  And  it  is  something  that 
she  honoured  the  marriage  tie  in  revolutionary 
France,  where  love  was  at  its  lowest,  where 
divorce  was  dangerously  easy,  and  where  almost 
every  feature   by  which  marriage  is  accounted 


Madame  Roland.  49 

honourable  was  laughed  at  as  the  worn-out  pre- 
judice of  a  passed-away  rdgime.  "  We  have 
every  reason  to  believe,"  says  a  noble  critic, 
"  that  Madame  Roland  would  have  been  in- 
dulgent to  the  frailties  of  others,  yet  towards 
herself  she  remained  inexorable,  and  never  once 
admitted  the  possibility  of  forsaking  her  old 
husband,  or  becoming  a  faithless  wife,  save  in 
her  heart.  This  inconsistency,  so  completely 
the  reverse  of  what  has  been  generally  pictured, 
may,  we  think,  be  counted  to  such  a  woman  as 
a  virtue." 

Did  Madame  Roland  stray  as  far  a^  the  nature 
and  extent  of  her  theological  and  controversial 
studies  would  lead  us  to  infer  ?  We  scarcely 
think  so.  Although  she  confesses  to  having  by 
turns  participated  in  the  "  exigence  of  the  deist, 
the  rigour  of  the  atheist,  the  insouciance  of  the 
sceptic,"  she  perhaps  holds  these  opinions  no 
longer  than  she  was  Eucharis  or  Erminia.  For 
the  time  being,  whatever  the  creed,  she  is  earn- 
est and  sincere.  But  the  early  impressions  do 
not  wear  out  so  easily.  She  is  still  moved, 
penetrated  by  the  celebration  of  divine  worship  ; 
she  still  sedulously  hears  mass  if  only  "  for  the 
edification  of  her  neighbour."  Out  of  the  ma- 
terialist atmosphere  of  the  time,  she  believes. 
Her  hopes  instinctively  turn  heavenward  ;  it  is 
4 


50  Four  Frenchwomen » 

only  in  the  study  that  she  doubts.  "  U esprit  a 
beau  s'avancer,  il  ne  va  jamais  aussi  loin  que  le 
coeur."  Let  it  be  recorded,  too,  that  she  never 
fails  to  raise  the  simple  prayer  she  quoted,  and 
that  the  last  words  of  her  summary  —  words 
carefully  expunged  by  her  republican  first  edi- 
tor —  are,  "  Dieu  juste,  re(^ois-moi !  " 

We  do  not  propose  to  attempt  her  physical 
portrait.  Beyond  her  own  written  description, 
and  the  scattered  testimonies  of  contemporaries, 
the  fact  is  that  no  satisfactory  picture  exists. 
The  painting  of  Heinsius  at  Versailles  has  the 
dark,  intelligent  eyes,  the  abundant  hair,  "  tied 
up  with  blue  ribbon,"  the  nose,  somewhat  large 
at  the  end  "  qui  me  faisail  quelque  peine,''  and 
other  material  points  of  resemblance  ;  but  "  it 
shows  her,"  says  M.  Dauban,  *'  in  one  only  of 
her  aspects."  "  Four  artists"  (this  is  Cham- 
pagneux,  her  second  editor)  "  failed  to  paint 
her ;  the  fifth  effort,  which  I  reproduce  here,  is 
the  happiest ;  there  is  certainly  a  resemblance, 
but  an  infinitude  of  details  are  lost."  "  None 
of  my  portraits,"  she  herself  informs  us,  "  give 
any  idea  of  me,  except,  perhaps,  a  cameo  by 
Langlois."  The  truth  is  that  the  artists  drew 
her  in  repose,  and  repose  was  not  her  strength. 
She  had  more  mind  than  face,  "  more  expression 
than  feature,"  as  she  puts  it.     Always  eloquent, 


Madame  Roland.  51 

when  animated  she  became  beautiful,  and  carried 
everything  before  her  by  her  fluency,  her  enthu- 
siasm, the  rhythm  of  her  periods,  and  the  beauty 
of  her  voice.  Miss  Helena  Williams,  Lemontey, 
Riouffe,  Beugnot,  all  testify  to  the  charm  of 
her  conversation.  "  Camille  [Desmoulins]  w^as 
right,"  she  says  somewhere  in  the  memoirs,  "  in 
his  surprise  that,  at  my  age,  and  with  so  little 
beauty,  I  had  what  he  calls  admirers."  "  I  never 
spoke  to  him."  The  patient  biographer,  who 
only  sees  her  dimly  through  the  dust  of  shaken 
documents,  is  more  unfortunate  than  the  unfor- 
tunate Camille. 

Nor  can  we  hope  to  do  much  more  than 
vaguely  outline  her  mental  portrait.  Man  by 
the  head  and  woman  by  the  heart,  she  is  appar- 
ently a  chapter  of  antitheses  —  a  changing  com- 
pound of  sense  and  sensibility,  of  reason  and 
feeling.  Ranging  through  light  and  shadow,  — 
"  mobile  as  the  air  that  she  breathes  ;  "  now 
forced  by  politics  into  hard,  unreasoning  hatreds, 
now  loving  with  a  passion  beyond  control ;  now 
so  masculine  that  we  distrust  her,  now  so  femi- 
nine that  we  admire ;  naturally  graceful,  un- 
pleasantly affected  ;  "  Puritan  and  rigorist  with 
overflowing  youth  and  spirit,  active  and  ambi- 
tious with  the  tastes  of  an  ascetic ; "  more 
bourgeoise  than  patrician,  more  patrician   than 


52  Four  Frenchwomen. 

bourgeoise,  —  the  catalogue  is  one  of  opposi- 
tions innumerable,  of  delicate  distinctions  to  be 
marked  only  by  the  practised  pencil  of  an 
Arnold  or  a  Sainte-Beuve. 

And  yet,  with  all  her  war  of  head  and  heart, 
with  all  her  fallacies  —  and  those  were  mostly 
of  the  time,  not  hers  —  she  is  still  a  very  noble 
woman,  albeit  nourished  "  on  Logics,  Encyclo- 
pidies,  and  the  Gospel  according  to  Jean- 
Jacques."  In  Carlyle's  words,  "  she  shines  in 
that  black  wreck  of  things  like  a  white  Grecian 
statue."  Her  life  is  grandly  closed  by  the 
antique  dignity  of  her  death. 


III. 

There  is  an  odd  fiction  current  of  those  days, 
the  invention  probably  of  La  Harpe,  called  the 
'*  Prophecy  of  Cazotte."  In  1788,  so  runs  the 
story,  a  fashionable  company  is  assembled  at 
the  house  of  a  great  man,  a  nobleman  and  acade- 
mician. All  talking  France  is  there,  laced, 
gallant,  and  frivolous.  To  and  fro  in  the  crowd 
go  the  dapper  abbes,  murmuring  mysteriously  at 
ladies'  ears,  like  bees  at  bells  of  flowers.  Very 
polished  are  the  peliis-mailres,  very  radiant  the 
marquises.    Some  one,  be-ribboned,  with  a  hand 


Madame  Roland.  53 

upon  his  heart,  is  quavering  out  a  love-song  of 
Aline  or  Claudine.  Here  Chamfort,  brilliant 
and  cynical,  is  relating  a  questionable  anecdote, 
to  cheeks  that  do  not  blush,  to  eyes  that  do  not 
droop.  Backwards  and  forwards  the  winged 
words  flutter,  and  glitter,  and  sting.  For  this 
is  the  age  of  wit,  of  the  chasse  aux  idi!es,  of  facile 
phrases,  and  of  rapid  thoughts.  History  is 
settled  forever  in  the  twinkling  of  a  fan ;  theology 
is  rounded  to  an  epigram  ;  philosophy  is  a  pretty 
firework  with  a  cascade  of  sparks.  But  the  all- 
engrossing  topic  is  the  "  grand  and  sublime 
revolution  "  that  approaches  —  the  Reign  of 
Reason  that  is  to   be. 

There  is  but  one  among  the  guests  who  sits 
apart, — Cazotte,  the  mystic  and  Martinist.  A 
little  scorn  is  curved  about  his  lips.  Perhaps 
he  sees  farther  than  the  rest.  They  rally  him, 
and  he  begins  to  prophesy,  amidst  peals  of 
laughter.  '•  You,  Monsieur  de  Condorcet," 
says  he,  "  will  die  upon  the  flags  of  a  prison, 
after  having  taken  poison  to  cheat  the  execu- 
tioner. You,"  and  the  finger  pointed  to  Cham- 
fort,  "  will  open  your  veins."  All  have  their 
turns,  —  Bailly,  Malesherbes,  Vicq-d'Azyr,  and 
the  rest.  "  But  the  women  r "  asks  the  Duchess 
of  Gramont ;  "  we  are  lucky,  we  women,  to  go 
for  nothing  in  your  revolutions."     "  'T  is  not 


54  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

that  we  don't  meddle  in  them,  but  it  seems  we 
shall  not  suffer."  "  You  are  wrong,  mesdames," 
returned  Cazotte,  ^''  for  this  time  you  will  be 
treated  like  the  men.'''' 

It  was  true.  In  all  the  combats,  all  the  expia- 
tions of  the  Revolution,  they  had  their  place. 
In  all  the  clamour  of  party,  and  all  the  solitude 
of  captivity,  their  voices  were  heard.  Most 
nobly,  too,  they  played  those  painful  parts,  and 
none  more  nobly  than  Madame  Roland.  "  They 
kill  us,"  said  Vergniaux  of  Marie  de  Corday  — 
*'  they  kill  us  ;  but  at  least  they  teach  us  how 
to  die." 

Upon  the  arrest  of  her  husband,  Madame 
Roland  had  risen,  almost  from  a  bed  of  sickness, 
and  hurried  to  the  Convention  to  demand  his 
release.  But  she  could  see  no  one  :  the  Con- 
vention was  in  a  state  of  siege.  Outside,  the 
court  of  the  Tuileries  was  swarming  with  armed 
men  ;  inside,  the  hall  presented  a  scene  of  hope- 
less clamour  and  confusion.  Vergniaux,  who 
comes  at  last,  is  paralysed  and  helpless.  When, 
after  long  waiting,  she  returned  home,  she  found 
that  Roland  had  escaped.  At  seven  the  next 
morning  she  was  herself  arrested,  and  taken  into 
the  Abbaye,  where  she  was  placed  in  the  cell 
afterwards  occupied  by  Brissot  and  Mile,  de 
Corday. 


Madame  Roland.  55 

She  "  took  her  prison  for  an  hermitage,"  as 
Lovelace  sings.  Never,  we  think,  were  those 
true  words  so  truly  realised.  She  bore  the 
whole  of  her  captivity  —  a  durance  so  vile  that 
Beugnot  longed  for  death  in  preference  —  al- 
most without  a  murmur.  Only  once,  and  then 
borne  down  by  the  miseries  of  her  friends,  she 
thought  of  suicide,  when  suicides  were  common. 
As  soon  as  she  got  within  the  walls  she  set  her- 
self to  conquer  her  position.  Forgetful  alike  of 
her  companions,  of  her  narrow,  stifling  cage  — 
forgetful,  too  (and  this  was  hard  !)  of  the  foul 
lampoons  of  Hebert,  which,  by  a  refinement  of 
cruelty,  were  screeched  each  day  beneath  her 
very  windows,  she  buried  herself  in  her  books. 
"  I  have  my  Thomson,"  she  writes  to  Buzot 
from  the  Abbaye,  "•  Shaftesbury,  an  English  dic- 
tionary, Plutarch,  and  Tacitus."  "  I  have  taken 
to  drawing  again,  I  read  the  classics,  and  I 
am  working  at  my  English."  Bosc  sends  her 
flowers  from  the  Jardin  des  Plantes.  With 
these  she  so  enlivens  her  retreat,  that  the  aston- 
ished gaoler  declares  he  shall  call  it  in  future  the 
"  Pavilion  of  Flora."  At  St.  Pelagic,  to  which 
she  is  soon  removed,  she  is  rather  better  lodged. 
"My  cell,"  she  writes  again,  "  is  just  large 
enough  to  allow  of  a  chair  beside  the  bed. 
Here,  at  a  tiny  table,   I   read,  and   draw,  and 


56  Four  Frenchwomen. 

write."  Here,  too,  she  often  sits  with  the  con- 
cierge, has  even  for  a  time  the  use  of  a  piano, 
for  so  do  her  keepers  favour  her.  And  every- 
where her  patient  serenity  wins  her  friends, 
where  friends  are  rarest,  everywhere  her  quiet 
dignity  commands  respect.  "  All  the  prison 
officials,"  says  Champagneux,  "  treated  her  with 
the  greatest  deference."  Her  cell  is  "  a  temple." 
"  Never  in  his  life  has  he  admired  her  as  he 
does  now." 

At  last  she  is  transferred  to  the  Conciergerie, 
the  ante-chamber  of  the  guillotine.  Riouffe  and 
Count  Beugnot  have  both  left  records  of  her 
latter  days  in  this,  the  latest  of  her  prisons. 
"  When  she  arrived,"  says  the  former,  '*  without 
being  in  the  prime  of  life,  she  was  still  very 
charming ;  she  was  tall  and  elegantly  shaped  ; 
her  countenance  was  very  intelligent,  but  mis- 
fortune and  a  long  confinement  had  left  their 
traces  on  her  face,  and  softened  her  natural 
vivacity.  Something  more  than  is  usually  found 
in  the  looks  of  women  painted  itself  in  those 
large  black  eyes  of  hers,  full  of  expression  and 
sweetness.  She  spoke  to  me  often  at  the  grate, 
calling  the  beheaded  Twenly-lwo  '  our  friends, 
whom  we  are  so  soon  to  follow.'  We  were  all 
attentive  round  her  in  a  sort  of  admiration  and 
astonishment ;    she    expressed    herself  with  a 


Madame  Roland.  57 

purity,  with  a  harmony  and  prosody,  that  made 
her  language  hke  music,  of  which  the  ear  could 
never  have  enough."  "  Her  conversation  was 
serious,  not  cold  ;  coming  from  the  mouth  of  a 
beautiful  woman,  it  was  frank  and  courageous 
as  that  of  a  great  man,  .  .  .  and  yet  her  servant 
said,  '  Before  you,  she  collects  her  strength  ; 
but  in  her  own  room  she  will  sit  three  hours 
sometimes,  leaning  upon  the  window,  and 
weeping.'  " 

All  sorts  of  company  met  in  the  Conciergerie. 
"Where  once  the  cells  held  ten,  some  thirty  were 
crammed.  The  Duchess  of  Gramont  was  hustled 
by  a  pickpocket,  sisters  of  charity  were  huddled 
with  the  scum  of  the  Salp6tnere.  But  here, 
amongst  the  lowest  of  the  low,  the  room  of 
Madame  Roland  became  an  "  asylum  of  peace." 
"  If  she  descended  into  the  court,"  says  Beug- 
not,  "her  presence  alone  restored  order;  and 
these  women,  whom  no  other  power  controlled, 
were  restrained  by  the  fear  of  her  displeasure. 
She  gave  pecuniary  help  to  the  most  needy  ;  to 
all,  counsel,  consolation,  hope."  Round  her 
they  clustered  as  round  a  tutelary  goddess,  while 
they  treated  the  Du  Barry  like  the  worst  of 
themselves.  When  she  left  they  clung  about 
her,  crying  and  kissing  her  hand,  "a  sight," 
says  he  again,  "  beyond  description."     It  was 


58  Four  Frenchwomen. 

only  an  eight  days'  sojourn  that  she  made,  but 
many  of  the  inmates  of  those  dark  dungeons 
grieved  sincerely  when  she  died. 

The  famous  Chauveau  de  la  Garde,  chivalrous 
to  Quixotism,  always  ready  for  that  dangerous 
honour  of  disputing  his  victims  to  Fouquier-Tin- 
ville,  came  to  offer  her  his  advocacy,  but  she 
declined  it,  refusing  to  peril  his  head  in  her  de- 
fence. She  went  to  the  tribunal  wholly  dressed 
in  white,  "■  her  long  black  hair  hanging  down 
to  her  girdle."  Coming  back,  she  smilingly  drew 
her  hand  over  the  back  of  her  neck,  to  signify  to 
her  fellow-prisoners  that  she  was  doomed.  She 
had  thanked  her  judges  for  having  thought  her 
worthy  to  share  the  fate  of  the  great  and  good 
men  they  had  murdered,  "  and  will  try,"  so  she 
says,  "to  show  upon  the  scaffold  as  much 
courage  as  they." 

She  did  so.  At  the  foot  of  the  guillotine,  it 
is  said,  she  asked  for  pen  and  paper  to  write  the 
strange  thoughts  that  were  rising  in  her,  but  her 
request  was  not  granted.  Her  sole  companion 
in  the  tumbril  was  a  certain  Lamarque,  an 
assignat-printer.  She  cheered  and  consoled 
him  —  almost  brought  back  his  failing  courage 
by  her  easy  gaiety.  To  shorten  his  suffering 
she  offered  to  give  up  to  him  her  right  of  dying 
first ;     but    Sanson    pleaded     adverse    orders. 


Madame  Roland.  59 

*'  Come,  you  can't  refuse  the  last  request  of  a 
lady,"  and  Sanson  yields.  As  they  were  buck- 
ling her  on  the  plank  her  eyes  caught  sight  of 
the  great  statue  of  Liberty  which  stood  on  the 
Place  de  la  Revolution.  "  O  LiberU,  comme 
on  fa  joude ! "  murmured  she.  .  .  .  And  in  the 
cemetery  of  the  Madeleine  there  is  no  stone  to 
show  where  lie  the  ashes  of  the  Queen  of  the 
Gironde. 

There  were  two  men  living  at  that  hour  who 
did  not  long  survive  the  knowledge  of  her  death. 
One,  all  stunned  and  shattered,  leaves  his  place 
of  refuge,  walks  out  four  leagues  from  Rouen, 
and,  sitting  down  quietly  against  a  tree,  passes 
his  sword-cane  through  his  heart,  dying  so 
calmly  that  he  seems,  when  found  next  morning, 
"  as  if  asleep."  The  other,  at  St.  Emilion, 
"  loses  his  senses  for  several  days."  He,  too, 
tracked  from  place  to  place,  and  wandering 
away  from  his  pursuers,  is  found  at  last  in  a 
cornfield  near  Castillon,  half-eaten  by  the  wolves. 
The  first  of  these  men  was  her  husband,  Roland  ; 
the  second  was  her  lover,  Buzot. 


THE    PRINCESS   DE  LAMBALLE. 
I 749-1 792. 


" Elle itait  aussi  bonne  quejolie" 

Memoirs  of  the  Prince  de  Ligne. 


THE   PRINCESS   DE  LAMBALLE. 

I. 

T  N  one  of  his  Spectator  papers  Mr.  Addison 
-*•     has  remarked  of  some  of  the  characters  in 
certain  heroic  poems  that  they  seem  to  have 
been  invented  for  no  other  purpose  than  to  be 
killed,  and  that  they  are  celebrated  for  nothing 
more  than  the  being  knocked  on  the  head  with 
a  species  of  distinction.     The  same  may  be  said 
of  many  of  the  Revolutionary  heroes  and  hero- 
ines.    They  appear  to    have    suddenly  started 
from  the  obscurity  of  insignificance,  or,  it  may 
be,  of  self-imposed  seclusion,  into  one  luminous 
moment  under  the  guillotine.     Of  their  life,  too, 
perhaps  "  nothing  became  them  like  the  leaving 
of  it."     It  is  difficult,  therefore  —  in  many  cases 
impossible  —  to    complete   their    stories.     The 
author  of  the  biography  which,  in  the  present  in- 
stance, constitutes  our  most  important  source  of 
information,  is  too  skilful  and  elegant  a  penman 
to  be  either  dull  or  tedious,  while  he  is  far  too 
clever  not  to  endeavour  to  conceal  the  slender 
nature  of  his  stock-in-trade.     But  one  cannot 
but  feel  that  his  wealth  of  words  smacks  some- 


64  Four  Frenchwomen. 

what  of  the  questionable  hospitality  of  the  Bar- 
mecide ;  and  it  is  not  easy  to  avoid  remarking 
that  his  book  is  not  so  much  the  "  life  "  as  the 
"  death  "  of  the  Princess  de  Lamballe.  M.  de 
Lescure's  respect  has  prompted  him  to  raise  a 
votive  temple  where  the  simple  mural  record 
would  suffice,  and  we  confess  ourselves  not  a 
little  impressed  by  the  dexterity  with  which  he 
has  expanded  his  meagre  data  into  a  goodly  vol- 
ume of  nearly  five  hundred  pages.  For,  in 
truth,  the  material  for  a  memoir,  properly  so 
called,  does  not  seem  to  exist.  The  present 
specimen  commences  with  the  marriage  of 
Madame  de  Lamballe  in  1767  :  we  catch 
glimpses  of  her  between  the  woods  of  Rambouil- 
let  and  the  Court  of  Versailles  —  now  by  the 
side  of  the  queen,  now  by  the  Duke  of  Pen- 
thi^vre  —  until  1791,  and  we  have  travelled  half 
through  our  volume.  Autobiographical  records 
there  are  none.  Her  correspondence  was  small 
—  indeed,  she  does  not  appear  to  have  been 
imbued  with  that  furor  scribendi  which  was 
characteristic  of  so  many  of  her  contemporaries, 
and  the  pair  of  notes  her  biographer  prints  have 
no  especial  individuality  beyond  a  certain  bird- 
like, caressing  tenderness.  There  is  nothing 
here  to  plead  for  her  against  the  insinuation  of 
Madame  de  Genlis  that  she  was  not  witty,  for 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  65 

certainly  it  is  nowhere  recorded  that  she  ever 
said  a  quotable  thing  —  nay,  she  even  died  with- 
out uttering  the  hon  mot  or  "  last  word  "  which 
appears  to  have  been  an  historical  necessity  of 
the  times.  But  she  is  one  of  those  the  very 
silences  of  whose  lives  are  earnest  of  their  excel- 
lence, one  of  the  good  people  whose  histories 
are  unwritten  because  they  were  good  people. 
Like  the  Virgilia  to  whom  we  have  later  likened 
her  —  that  Virgilia  who,  in  the  whole  of  Corio- 
lanus,  speaks  scarcely  thirty  verses,  and  yet 
remains,  nevertheless,  perhaps  the  most  distinctly 
womanly  of  all  Shakspeare's  exquisite  women  — 
she  has  little  need  to  talk  in  order  to  be  known. 
We  recognise  her  merit  by  the  few  testimonies 
of  her  contemporaries,  by  the  total  absence  of 
any  authentic  accusation,  by  the  "  She  was  as 
good  as  pretty  "  of  a  man  like  the  Prince  de 
Ligne,  by  the  "  good  angel '"  of  the  peasants  of 
Penthievre  ;  and,  looking  back  to  Hickel's  por- 
trait, a  blonde,  beautiful  head,  with  the  lux- 
uriant hair  which  once,  they  say,  broke  from  its 
bands  and  rippled  to  her  feet  —  looking  back, 
too,  not  ignorant  of  the  days  in  which  she  lived, 
we  dare  not  choose  but  believe  that  this  delicate 
girlish  woman  of  forty,  round  whose  lips,  despite 
the  veil  of  sadness  in  the  eyes,  a  vague  infans 
pudor  still  lingers  like  a  perfume,  was,  what 
5 


66  Four  Frenchwomen. 

we  account  her  to  have  been,  a  very  tender, 
loving,  and  unhappy  lady.  "We  shall  endeavour, 
with  M.  de  Lescure's  assistance,  to  relate  what, 
with  any  certainty,  can  be  ascertained  about 
her. 


II. 


In  1767  the  Duke  of  Penthi^vre,  grandson  of 
that  haughty  Athena'is  de  Montespan,  who  was 
supplanted  in  the  favour  of  the  Grand  Monarque 
by  the  Duchess  de  Fontanges,  had  asked  Louis 
XV.  to  choose  him  a  wife  for  his  son,  the  Prince 
de  Lamballe.  The  king  named  the  Princess  of 
Savoy.  Communications  had  passed  between 
the  courts  of  France  and  Sardinia,  and  the  young 
prince,  reassured  by  a  portrait  of  the  lady-,  had 
lent  himself  with  docility  to  his  father's  proposal. 
The  contract  was  forthwith  signed,  and  the 
Princess  entered  France,  arriving  on  the  30th 
of  January  at  Montereau.  Here  she  was  en- 
countered by  a  gaily-dressed  and  mysterious 
page  "  with  ardent  and  inquiring  looks,"  who 
respectfully  offered  her  a  magnificent  bouquet, 
and  in  whom  she  afterwards,  with  a  pleasant 
surprise,  recognised  her  future  husband.  The 
marriage  took  place  on  the  same  day  in  the 
chapel  of  the  Chateau  de  Nangis,  the  home  of 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  67 

the  Count  de  Guerchy.  On  the  5th  of  Feb- 
ruary she  was  presented  at  "Versailles,  and  a 
prompt  court  poet  called  attention  to  the  pair  in 
a  classic  duet,  where  the  nymph  of  the  Seine, 
consoling  Hymen  in  his  lament  upon  the  de- 
generacy of  the  age,  bids  him  rejoice  at  the 
brilliant  promises  of  the  union  of  Marie-Ther^se- 
Louise  de  Savoie-Carignan  and  the  "  son  of 
Penthi^vre." 

Was  it  so  happy,  this  smiling  union  of  seven- 
teen and  twenty  ?  It  was  not.  The  prime 
element  of  fidelity  was  ignored  —  *'  marriage 
was  no  longer  a  tie  "  in  the  court  of  Louis  XV. 
The  Prince  de  Lamballe  was  young  and  ardent, 
branded  with  the  terrible  Bourbon  temperament, 
freshly  emancipated  from  that  over-strict  edu- 
cation which  foreruns  excess,  and,  if  not  wicked, 
very  weak.  What  could  be  anticipated  of  the 
Telemachus,  with  a  possible  Richelieu  for 
Mentor,  a  Chartres  or  a  Lauzun  for  co-disciple, 
and  an  easily-conquered  Eucharis  at  the  Comedie 
Frangaise  ?  Only  two  months  of  married  life, 
and  the  absences  from  the  bergerie  — as  it  was 
called  —  grew  sadly  frequent,  rumours  of  petit- 
soupers  reached  Rambouillet,  whispers  of  a 
certain  Mile,  la  Forest,  of  a  certain  Mile,  la 
Chassaigne.  It  is  Fielding's  story  over  again, 
this  one  of  Marie  de  Lamballe  —  a  story  of  short 


68  Four  Frenchwomen. 

returns  to  domesticity,  of  endless  wifely  for- 
bearance and  womanly  forgiveness  ;  the  story  of 
Amelia,  without  the  repentance  of  Booth,  and 
with  a  terrible  catastrophe.  Only  the  husband  of 
a  year,  and  Louis  de  Bourbon  had  run  the  swift 
course  which  ends  in  a  disgraceful  death.  He 
died  in  1768,  before  he  was  twenty-one.  For 
his  epitaph  we  must  turn  to  Bachaumont's 
Memoirs.  "  The  English  Gamester,'''  says  the 
chronicler  of  Mme.  Doublet's  nouvelles  d,  la 
main,  "  was  played  here  yesterday  under  the 
name  of  Beverley,  a  Tragidie  Bourgeoise,  imi- 
tated from  the  English.  Although  the  name  of 
the  Duke  of  Orleans  had  been  announced  the 
day  before,  it  did  not  appear  in  the  bill,  which 
signifies  that  the  prince,  in  his  sorrow,  could  not 
attend  the  representation  or,  at  least,  was  only 
there  incognito,  on  account  of  the  death  of  the 
Prince  de  Lamballe."  Bachaumont  does  not 
say  in  express  terms  that  the  duke  did  go  to 
the  play — incognito.  But,  to  us,  the  careless 
frankness  of  the  phrase  seems  to  paint  admirably 
the  skin-deep  delicacy,  the  cambric-kandkerchief 
commiseration  of  these  great  gentlemen  at  Ver- 
sailles, of  whom  their  own  journalist  can  make 
a  remark  at  once  so  naive  and  candid. 

The  princess,  who   had  nursed  her  husband 
tenderly  in  his  fatal  illness,  had  pardoned   his 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  69 

transgressions  and  won  back  his  confidence  and 
affection,  now  "sorrowed  for  him  as  if  he  had 
deserved  it."  The  widow  of  eighteen  retired 
to  Rambouillet,  near  Versailles,  the  seat  of  her 
father-in-law,  the  Duke  of  Penthievre,  to  whom, 
bereaved  of  his  son  and  anticipating  a  separation 
from  his  daughter.  Mile,  de  Bourbon,  she  for 
the  future  consecrated  her  life.  At  this  time 
she  had  regained  the  natural  elasticity  of  her 
spirits,  although  already  subject  to  the  fits  of 
melancholy  which  later  became  more  frequent. 
The  woods  of  Rambouillet  ranij  often  to  the 
laughter  of  the  two  princesses  whom  the  ascetic 
duke,  "  serious  and  austere  only  for  himself," 
called  laughingly  "  the  pomps  of  the  century." 
To  one  of  them,  says  his  valet  Fortaire,  he 
w^ould  sometimes  pleasantly  whisper  after  the 
balls  at  Passy,  "  Marie  la  folk,  how  many 
quadrilles  have  you  danced  to-day  ? " 

We  could  willingly  linger,  did  space  permit, 
upon  this  figure  of  the  charitable  Duke  of  Pen- 
thievre, that  contrasts  so  strongly  with  the  De 
Lignes  and  Lauzuns  of  his  day  ;  this  "  bourru 
bienfaisant  "  and  founder  of  hospitals,  who  had 
fought  at  Dettingen  and  Fontenoy,  and  who 
lived  the  life  of  a  Benedictine  ;  this  kindly  prac- 
tical castellan  of  Cr6cy  and  Sceaux,  of  whom 
his  secretary  Florian  had  written  — 


70  Four  Frenchwomen. 

"Bourbon  ti' invite  pas  les  fol&tres  bergtres 
A  s' assembler  sous  les  ormeaux; 
II  ne  se  niele  pas  h  leur  danses  legtres, 
Mais  il  leur  donne  des  troupeaux;  " 

we  could  willingly  recall  the  legend  of  this 
"king  of  the  poor"  whom  the  famished  royal 
hunt  stormed  in  his  solitude  at  Rambouillet,  to 
find  him  girt  with  a  white  apron,  flourishing  a 
ladle,  and  preparing  the  soup  of  his  pensioners  ; 
this  inconsequent  landholder,  who  salaried  the 
poachers  on  his  estate  to  prevent  a  recurrence 
of  their  fault,  who  hunted  for  benefactions  with 
all  the  ardour  of  a  sportsman,  and  who,  in 
company  with  Florian,  had  cleared  the  country 
round  of  paupers,  and  created  a  positive  dearth 
of  wretchedness  and  misery,  and  whose  known 
charities  and  virtues  had  preserved  him  through 
the  worst  days  of  the  Terror,  to  die  at  last  — 
broken  by  sorrow  but  strong  in  faith  —  in  his 
home  at  Vernon,  where  the  popular  memory  still 
lovingly  cherishes  its  recollection  of  the  good 
white  head  and  open  hand  of  the  old  Duke  of 
Penthi^vre.  But  we  have  another  name  at  the 
commencement  of  our  paper. 

Madame  de  Lamballe  was  suddenly  drawn 
from  the  seclusion  of  Rambouillet  by  an  intrigue 
which  had  no  less  an  object  than  to  place  her 
upon  the  throne  of  France.     In    1764  —  three 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  71 

years  before  —  the  great  Queen-courtesan  —  la 
marraine  du  rococo  —  Madame  de  Pompadour, 
had  passed  away,  painted  and  powerful  even  on 
her  deathbed,  and  her  royal  master  had  watched 
her  exit  with  a  heartless  jest.  This  was  followed, 
in  1765,  by  the  death  of  the  sombre,  serious 
dauphin.  For  a  time  a  qualified  decency  pre- 
vailed at  the  court,  but  when  at  last,  in  1768,  the 
quiet  queen  faded  from  the  half-light  of  her  life 
to  the  darker  obscurity  of  the  grave,  all  the 
"Versailles  plotters  and  panders  set  eagerly  to 
work  to  provide  the  king  with  a  successor. 
Two  parties  formed  :  the  one  striving  to  decoy 
him  back  to  the  paths  of  decency,  and  to  provide 
a  worthy  successor  to  the  pious  Maria  Leczinska ; 
the  other  attempting  to  attract  the  degraded  and 
irresolute  monarch  to  a  new  Cotillon  III.  The 
first,  a  strong  court  party,  was  headed  by  the 
king's  favourite  daughter,  Madame  Adelaide, 
together  with  the  Noailles  family  (the  Duchess 
of  Penthi^vre  had  been  a  Noailles),  and  sought 
to  advance  Madame  de  Lamballe  to  the  queenly 
dignity  ;  while  the  second,  led  by  the  king's  old 
tempter,  Richelieu,  and  his  Chiffinch,  the  famous 
Lebel,  endeavoured  to  introduce  a  certain  dis- 
reputable Mademoiselle  Lange  into  the  royal 
household.  The  latter  attempt  was  successful ; 
partly,  perhaps,  because  the  princess,  who  seems 


72  Four  Frenchwomen. 

to  have  been  a  passive  and  unsolicitous  agent  in 
the  matter,  was  not  calculated,  from  the  very 
sweetness  and  excellence  of  her  nature,  to  entice 
the  sluggish  sensualist  who  governed  France 
back  to  the  self-respect  that  he  had  forgotten  ; 
partly,  again,  because  the  less  reputable  schemers 
were  aided  by  the  opposition  of  the  great  min- 
ister Choiseul,  who  dreaded  the  ascendency  of 
the  family  of  Noailles,  and  who  was,  moreover, 
strengthened  by  the  disappointed  ambition  of 
his  sister,  Madame  de  Gramont,  who  had  herself 
—  so  rumour  averred  — aspired  without  success 
to  the  falling  mantle  of  the  Pompadour.  Thus 
to  the  wife  of  the  peculator  D'  Etioles  followed 
a  more  scandalous  successor.  Mademoiselle 
Lange  began  her  reign  as  the  Countess  Du 
Barry,  and  the  princess  went  back  to  her  Ram- 
bouillet  solitude. 

But  Choiseul,  although  he  had  secretly  op- 
posed the  party  of  Madame  AdelaTde,  would 
not  bend  to  the  new  favourite,  ennobled  as  she 
was.  He  had  been  pliant  enough  to  Madame  de 
Pompadour  —  the  clever  robine  and  art-patroness 
whom  Maria  Theresa  had  condescended  to 
flatter  —  but  he  would  not  imitate  her  further 
and  treat  with  this  gaming-house  syren  —  this 
impure  "  Venus  sprung  from  the  scum  of  the 
Parisian  deep  "  —  this  Countess  Du  Barry.    We 


The  Princess  de  Lainballe.  73 

have  no  intention  of  digressing  into  the  web 
of  that  long  intrigue  in  which  the  selfish  king, 
blinded  with  luxury,  and  muttering  parrot-like 
on  his  crumbling  throne  the  temporising  Aprds 
moi  le  dduge  which  Pompadour  had  taught  him, 
yielded  at  last  to  Maupeou  and  Terrai,  and  exiled 
his  sole  capable  minister  to  his  home  at  Chan- 
teloup.  But  before  his  exile  he  had  completed 
one  negotiation  which  concerns  us,  the  marriage 
of  the  dauphin,  on  the  24th  April,  1770,  to  Marie 
Antoinette,  Archduchess  of  Austria. 

Almost  from  this  date  commences  the  friend- 
ship of  Marie  Antoinette  and  Marie  de  Lamballe. 
The  warm-hearted,  high-spirited  dauphiness, 
seeking  for  sympathy  in  the  strange  formal  court 
where  so  many  looked  askance,  passed  by  the 
Picquignys,  Saint-Megrins,  and  Cosses,  to  find 
in  the  princess  a  friend  at  once  equal  and  tender, 
at  once  disinterested  and  devoted  ;  a  favourite 
who  asked  no  favour,  except  for  charity.  Hence- 
forth, in  all  her  expeditions  to  Little  Trianon,  the 
queen  is  accompanied  by  her  inseparable  com- 
panion;  henceforth,  in  all  these  sledge  parties, 
which  were  the  delight  of  the  Parisians,  peeps 
from  fur  and  swansdown,  in  its  Slavonian  toquet 
and  heron  tuft,  the  flower-like  head  of  the  Prin- 
cess de  Lamballe.  Begun  at  the  weekly  balls  of 
the  Duchess  de  Noaiiles,  strengthened  by  the 


74  Four  Frenchwomen. 

princess's  newly-revived  office  of  Superintendent 
of  the  Queen's  Household,  paling  perhaps  a  little 
before  the  rising  star  of  the  Countess  de  Po- 
lignac,  but  knit  again  by  sorrow  and  tempered 
by  tears,  the  friendship  remained  the  most  last- 
ing and  characteristic  of  all  the  friendships  of 
the  unhappy  queen,  a  bond  to  be  broken  only 
by  death. 

MM.  de  Goncourt,  with  that  happy  pen  which 
seems  to  write  in  colours,  have  sketched  her 
portrait  at  this  period  with  a  felicity  of  expres- 
sion which  we  frankly  confess  ourselves  as 
unable  to  emulate  as  to  translate  :  — 

"  La  Reine,  comme  toutcs  Ics  femmes,  se  dd- 
fendait  mal  centre  ses  yeux.  La  figure  el  la  lour- 
nure  nMaient  pas  sans  la  toucher,  ei  les  portraits 
que  nous  sont  restds  de  Madame  de  Lamballe 
disent  la  premiere  raison  de  sa  faveur.  La  plus 
grand  heautd  de  Madame  de  Lamballe,  ilait  la 
siriniii  de  sa  physionomie.  Vdclair  mime  de 
ses  yeux  dtait  tranquille.  Malgrd  les  secousses  et 
la  fitvre  d'une  maladie  nerveuse,  il  rHy  avail  pas 
un  pli,  pas  une  nuage  sur  son  beau  front,  battu  de 
ces  longs  cheveux  blonds  qui  boucleront  encore 
autour  de  la  pique  de  Septembre.  Italienne,  Ma- 
dame de  Lamballe  avail  les  grdces  du  Nord,  et 
elle  n'itait  jamais  plus  belle  qu'en  Iraineau,  sous 
la  martre  et  Vhermine,  le  teint  fouetti  par  un  vent 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  75 

de,  neige,  ou  bien  encore  lorsque,  dans  Vombre 
d'un  grand  chapeau  de  paille,  dans  un  nuage  de 
linon,  elle  passait  comme  un  de  ces  rives  dont  le 
peintre  anglais  Laivrence  promdne  la  robe  blanche 
sur  les  verdures  mouilldes." 

So  much  for  her  physical  portrait  in  1775. 
With  regard  to  the  moral  aspect,  we  shall  speak 
—  faithfully  reproducing  contemporary  judg- 
ments wherever  they  can  be  given  without  reser- 
vation or  comment  —  in  the  words  of  the  Baronne 
d'Oberkirch,  as  quoted  by  M.  de  Lescure  :  — 
"She  is  a  model,"  says  this  lady,  "of  all  the 
virtues,  and  especially  of  filial  piety  to  the  father 
of  her  unfortunate  husband,  and  of  devoted  af- 
fection to  the  queen.  .  .  .  Her  character  is  gay 
and  naive,  and  she  is  not  perhaps  very  witty. 
She  avoids  argument,  and  yields  immediately 
rather  than  dispute.  She  is  a  sweet,  good,  ami- 
able woman,  incapable  of  an  evil  thought,  bene- 
volence and  virtue  personified,  and  calumny  has 
never  made  the  slightest  attempt  to  attack  her. 
She  gives  immensely  —  more,  indeed,  than  she 
can,  and  even  to  the  point  of  inconveniencing 
herself,  for  which  reason  they  call  her  '  the 
good  angel '  in  the  lands  of  Penthievre." 

We  see  her  now  —  as  clearly  as  we  shall. 
We  know  this  delicate  lady  with  the  bouche  mig- 
nonne,  and  beautiful  eyes,  this  good  angel  of 


76  Four  Frenchwomen. 

Sceaux  and  Rambouillet,  this  alternate  Allegro 
and  Penseroso  of  the  landscapes  of  Le  Notre, 
this  queen's  friend,  *'  who  only  sought  credit  in 
order  to  be  useful,  and  favour  in  order  to  be 
loved." 

Charitable  and  pious,  gentle  and  lovable,  she 
stands  before  us  like  a  realisation  of  the  noble 
old  motto  of  devotion  —  Tender  and  True. 


III. 

The  eighteenth  century,  towards  its  latter  por- 
tion especially,  has  one  marked  and  curious 
feature  —  that  of  credulity.  "  Its  philosophers," 
says  Louis  Blanc,  "  had  overworked  analysis. 
They  had  over-sacrificed  sentiment  to  reason 
—  the  happiness  of  belief  to  the  pride,  of  sci- 
ence. The  intellect,  keeping  solitary  watch  in 
the  silence  of  the  other  faculties,  grows  wearied 
and  timorous  ;  it  ends  by  doubting  everything  — 
by  doubting  even  itself,  and  seeks  oblivion  at 
last  in  the  illusions  of  imagination.  Faith 
rests  from  thought,  and  the  repose  would  differ 
but  little  from  death  were  it  not  that  the  sleep  is 
filled  with  dreams.  .  .  .  Thus  after  "Voltaire  a 
reaction  was  inevitable,  and  the  besoin  de  croire, 
disconcerted  but  unconquered,  reappeared  in 
fantastic  forms." 


77?^  Princess  de  Lamballe.  77 

^^  Populus  vult  decipi ;  decipiatur/'  The  de- 
mand for  miracles  was  speedily  followed  by  the 
supply  of  prophets.  After  the  sober,  slow-pro- 
gressing car  of  science  there  suddenly  appeared 
another  equipage,  flaunting  and  noisy,  with  a 
jingling  jack-pudding,  and  a  steeple-hatted,  spec- 
tacled practitioner  —  the  chariot  of  the  quack. 
Next  to  Voltaire  and  Diderot,  Condorcet  and 
D'Alembert,  came  Dulcamara,  vaunting  his  phil- 
tres and  elixirs,  his  hypo-drops  and  his  electu- 
aries, holding  the  keys  of  the  Future,  and 
discovering  the  secrets  of  Life  and  of  Death. 
The  Parisians,  enervated  and  febrile,  greedy 
of  novelty,  cut  from  their  beliefs,  and  drifting 
they  knew  not  whither,  caught  eagerly  at  the 
promises  of  every  charlatan,  when  charlatans 
abounded.  They  cherished  and  credited  the 
impudent  sharper  and  picaresque  Don  Juan  — 
Casanova.  They  believed  in  the  ChcvalUre 
D'Eon  de  Beaumont,  who  persuaded  them  that 
he  was  man  or  woman  as  he  pleased.  They 
flocked  to  the  Count  de  St.  Germain,  who  had 
lived  for  several  centuries,  who  declared  that  he 
had  been  intimate  with  Francis  the  First,  and 
that  he  had  known  Our  Lord.  They  flocked 
to  the  mountebank  Giuseppe  Balsamo,  who  flu- 
ently informed  them  that  he  was  bom  in  the 
middle    of    the    Red   Sea  ;    that   he   had   been 


78  Four  Frenclnvornen. 

brought  up  among  the  Pyramids,  and  that  there 
—  abandoned  by  his  parents  —  he  had  learned 
everything  from  a  wonderful  old  man  who  had 
befriended  him.  They  flocked  to  the  salle  des 
crises  of  Mesmer  and  D'Eslon  ;  they  flocked  to 
the  magnetised  elms  of  the  Marquis  de  Puyse- 
gur.  They  crowded  the  meetings  of  masonic 
lodges,  and  listened  eagerly  to  the  obscure  elo- 
quence of  Saint  Martin,  the  mystic  doctrines  of 
Adam  Weishaupt.  Everywhere  the  quacks  mul- 
tiplied and  the  dupes  increased,  the  prophets 
prophesied  and  the  miracles  abounded :  the 
Parisians  wished  to  be  deceived,  and  were 
deceived. 

From  this  blindness  of  her  century  Madame 
de  Lamballe  was  not  wholly  exempt.  But  we 
may  fairly  assume  that  she  sought  neither  to 
alleviate  an  unsound  mental  activity  nor  to  sat- 
isfy a  pruriertt  craving  after  the  supernatural. 
If,  as  is  reported,  she  had  been  found  at  the 
stances  of  D'Eslon,  she  visited  the  "  enchanted 
vat "  only  with  the  vain  hope  of  obtaining  relief 
from  the  nervous  malady  for  which  she  had  so 
long  desired  a  remedy.  If,  again,  she  was  per- 
suaded to  become,  a  masoness,  we  are  expressly 
told  that  she  had  been  taught  to  see  in  such  a 
step  only  a  means  of  furthering  the  ends  of 
charity  ;  for  at  that  time,  as  remarks  one  of  her 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  79 

reviewers,  justice,  honour,  tolerance,  and  lib- 
erty were  in  all  mouths.  "  It  was  a  very  deli- 
rium of  benevolence  and  hope."  And  it  was 
not  easy  to  detect,  through  the  philanthropic 
jargon,  the  fanciful  rites  and  seeming  harmless 
festivals  of  the  secret  societies,  those  silent  and 
pertinacious  powers  that  were  slowly  sapping 
the  bases  of  things.  It  would  have  been  hard 
to  believe  —  in  1 78 1  —  that  the  Utopian  banquets 
of  the  lodges,  with  their  "  good  wine  and  bad 
verse,"  could  cover  the  laboratories  and  asylums 
for  nearly  all  the  indefinite  ambitions  —  all  the 
unquiet  yearnings  of  the  times.  Even  the  king 
himself,  whose  timorous  instincts  led  him  to  dis- 
trust private  meetings,  was  reassured  by  the  prin- 
cess's accounts  of  these  harmless  associations, 
that  dispensed  pensions  to  the  clinking  of 
glasses,  and  numbered  among  their  members 
all  the  greatest  nobles  of  the  court.  It  is  clear, 
too,  that  the  queen,  like  Madame  de  Lamballe, 
saw  in  that  sealed  masonic  mystery,  from  which 
issued  at  last,  as  from  the  fisherman's  jar  in  the 
Arabian  tale,  one  of  the  most  terrible  genii  of 
the  Revolution,  nothing  more  than  an  eccentric 
institution  for  the  practice  of -philanthropy.  Yet 
for  all  this,  as  M.  de  Lescure  affirms,  it  was  here 
that  the  affair  of  the  "  Necklace  "  had  its  birth 
and  its  elaboration.    It  was  here,  too,  that  many 


8o  Four  Frenchwomen. 

a  sleepless  French  Casca  sharpened  in  the  se- 
curity of  secrecy  the  daggers  of  '93.  These 
lively  bacchic  *'  Rondes  de  Tables,''  with  their 
"amiable  sisters"  and  assiduous  "brothers," 
their  Virtues  and  their  Graces,  Cythera  and 
Paphos,  were,  after  all,  but  the  lighter  preludes 
to  the  Carillon  National  and  the  sanguinary 
Carmagnole. 

With  the  exception  of  her  appointment  as 
Superintendent  of  the  Queen's  Household,  her 
affiliation  to  freemasonry  appears  to  have  been 
the  most  important  occurrence  in  the  life  of 
Madame  de  Lamballe  up  to  1785  —  the  most 
important,  of  course,  of  those  which  have  been 
recorded.  In  1777  she  had  been  admitted  into 
the  Loge  de  la  Candeur,  and  in  1781  she  ac- 
cepted the  dignity  of  grand  mistress -of  the 
Mdre  Loge  Ecossaise  d" Adoption.  We  shall 
not  reproduce  the  mediocre  but  complimentary 
verses  which  were  chanted  to  the  fair  assembly 
on  that  occasion  by  their  devoted  brother  and 
secretary,  M.  Robineau  de  Beaunoir.  In  1778 
she  lost  both  parents  ;  and  in  the  December  of 
the  same  year,  just  after  her  father's  death,  we 
find  her  by  the  queen's  bedside  at  the  birth  of 
the  future  Madame  Royale  —  "  the  poor  little 
one  not  the  less  dear  for  being  undesired." 

In    1 78 1    the  Mdre    Loge  Ecossaise  distin- 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  8i 

guished  itself  by  great  manifestations  of  charity 
in  honour  of  the  birth  of  the  much-desired  dau- 
phin. "  I  have  read  with  interest,"  writes  the 
queen  in  November  to  the  princess,  who  was 
nursing  the  old  Duke  of  Penthl^vre,  "  what  has 
been  done  in  the  masonic  lodges  over  which  you 
presided  at  the  commencement  of  the  year,  and 
about  which  you  amused  me  so.  ...  I  see 
that  they  do  not  only  sing  pretty  songs,  but  that 
they  also  do  good.  Your  lodges  have  followed 
in  our  footsteps  by  delivering  prisoners  and  mar- 
rying young  women."  Early  in  the  succeeding 
year  we  find  Madame  de  Lamballe  by  the  side 
of  Madame  Adelaide,  at  the  banquet  given  by 
the  city  of  Paris  to  the  king  in  celebration  of  the 
same  event,  when  there  was  placed  before  the 
company  a  Rhine  carp  which  had  cost  4,000 
francs,  and  which  his  majesty  had  the  bad  taste 
to  disapprove  of.  We  catch  a  glimpse  of  her 
under  the  girandoles  of  Versailles  at  the  ball 
given  to  the  Russian  grand  duke  (afterwards 
Paul  I.)  and  his  duchess  ;  and  again  "<?/i 
costume  de  batel'dre  de  Vile  d' Amour  "  at  the 
Chantilly /^/^s  arranged  by  the  Prince  de  Cond6 
in  honour  of  the  same  illustrious  personages. 

But  despite  the  affluence  of  words  with  which 
her  biographer  has  surrounded  his  subject,  the 
record  of  her  life  during  this  period  has  little 

6 


82  Four  Frenchwomen, 

more  than  the  barren  precision  of  a  court  cir- 
cular. During  all  this  time,  M.  de  Lescure 
assures  us,  she  was  actively  charitable,  but  her 
personal  history  is  of  the  kind  of  which  it  has 
been  cleverly  said,  "  Nous  entrevoyons,  nous  ne 
voyons  pas." 

From  its  commencement  to  1778,  the  friend- 
ship of  Madame  de  Lamballe  and  the  queen  had 
been  cloudless.  After  this,  for  reasons  which 
have  remained  obscure,  but  which  are  possibly 
referable  to  the  rising  favour  of  the  Countess 
Jules  de  Polignac,  it  had  slightly  languished. 
But  in  178^  it  revived  again  never  to  be  inter- 
rupted except  by  death.  In  178)  the  queen  had 
sore  need  of  such  an  aid.  The  shades  were 
thickening  round  the  throne,  and  she  stood  al- 
most alone.  She  had  lost  her  ally  and  adviser, 
Choiseul.  Her  court  had  thinned  to  a  little 
circle  of  friends.  Outside,  the  people  hated 
her,  and  made  the  Autrichienne  responsible  for 
every  popular  misfortune.  Outside,  the  whole 
kennel  of  libellers  and  chronicle-makers,  ballad- 
mongers  and  pamphleteers,  were  in  full  cry. 
She  was  upon  the  eve  of  that  great  scandal  of 
the  "  Necklace  ;  "  she  was  to  be  shaken  by  the 
death  of  the  Princess  Beatrice  —  she  was  to  be 
shaken  by  the  death  of  the  dauphin.  One  can 
comprehend  how  readily,  with  such  a  dismal 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  83 

present  and  such  a  darkling  future,  she  turned 
to  the  friend  "  who  had  retired  without  a  mur- 
mur, and  who  returned  without  complaint. 
'  Never  believe,'  she  said  to  her,  '  that  it  will 
be  possible  for  me  not  to  love  you  —  it  is  a  habit 
of  which  my  heart  has  need.'" 

From  1786  to  1789,  nevertheless,  the  life  is 
again  barren  of  incident.  In  the  middle  of  1787 
—  if  we  may  believe  a  letter  of  Horace  Wal- 
pole  —  she  paid  a  visit  to  England.  In  May, 
1789,  she  assisted  at  the  opening  of  the  States 
General,  and  during  the  whole  of  that  year 
seems  to  have  been  engaged,  on  behalf  of 
Marie  Antoinette,  in  negotiations  which  had 
for  their  object  the  conciliation  of  the  Orleans 
party.  On  the  7th  of  October  she  learned 
at  the  Chateau  d'Eu,  where  she  was  staying 
with  the  Duke  of  Penthi^vre,  of  the  transfer 
of  the  royal  family  to  the  Tuileries.  On  the 
8th  she  joined  the  queen. 

The  great  event  of  1791  is  the  unsuccessful 
flight  to  Varennes.  Simultaneously  with  the 
escape  of  the  royal  fugitives  the  princess  left 
the  Tuileries  and  sailed  from  Boulogne,  in  all 
probability  direct  to  England.  That  she  came 
to  this  country  at  this  time  there  appears  to 
be  no  doubt.  In  one  of  the  little  notes  printed 
by  M.  de  Lescure  in  facsimile,  with  its  ^'  palles 


84  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

de  mouches''''  handwriting,  she  speaks  of  being 
about  to  visit  Blenheim,  Oxford,  and  Bath,  and 
makes  great  fun  of  an  English  lady  whom  she 
had  heard  that  morning  reading  Nina  at  Brigh- 
ton. Peltier,  too,  writing  his  Dernier  Tableau 
here  in  1792-93,  speaks  of  her  having  been  at 
London  and  Bath  after  the  Varennes  affair. 

The  prime  motive  of  her  visit,  her  biographer 
supposes,  was  to  obtain  the  protection  of  the 
English  government  for  the  royal  family.  The 
queen  had  already  sent  a  messenger  —  possibly 
messengers  —  with  this  view,  but,  according  to 
Madame  Campan,  without  any  better  result 
than  the  unsatisfactory  declaration  of  Mr.  Pitt, 
that  "  he  would  not  allow  the  French  monarchy 
to  perish."  The  office  of  secret  ambassadress 
was  now  intrusted  to  Madame  de  Lamballe. 
"  The  fact  results,"  says  M.  de  Lescure, 
*'  from  the  following  passage  of  a  letter  of  the 
queen  [to  her  sister,  Marie  Christine,  Duchess 
of  Saxe  Teschen,  September,  1791],  which  ac- 
quaints us,  sadly  enough,  with  the  results  which 
she  obtained,"  and  from  which  we  quote  the  fol- 
lowing lines  :  —  "  The  queen  and  her  daughters 
received  her  favourably,  but  the  king's  reason  is 
gone.  [La  raison  du  Roi  est  dgarde.]  It  is  the 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  who  governs,  and 
he  said  cruelly,  and  almost  in  express  terms  to 


Tbe  Princess  de  Lamballe,  85 

the  princess,  that  we  had  brought  our  misfortune 
on  ourselves." 

The  passage,  no  doubt,  is  explicit.  But,  curi- 
ously enough,  this  very  passage  is  one  of  those 
which  were  selected  to  prove  the  untrustworthy 
nature  of  the  collection  of  Marie  Antoinette's 
letters  published  by  Count  Paul  d'Hunolstein. 
"We  had  indeed  been  struck  some  months  ago  by 
the  singular  way  in  which  the  queen  speaks  of 
Pitt,  but  we  caR  lay  no  claim  to  the  discovery 
of  anything  else.  A  writer  in  the  Edinburgh 
Review  for  April,  186^,  in  an  examination  of  the 
correspondence,  points  out  the  several  blunders 
into  which  the  concoctor  (for  we  must  assume 
it  so)  of  the  letter  meddling  with  this,  to  him, 
terra  incognita  of  England,  has  necessarily 
fallen.  They  are,  shortly,  as  follows  :  —  First 
and  foremost,  George  III.  was  not  out  of  his 
mind  at  this  time.  He  was  taken  ill  in  October, 
1788  ;  resumed  government  in  March,  1789  ; 
had  no  return  of  his  malady  for  several  years, 
and  was  certainly  in  full  possession  of  his  fac- 
ulties in  August,  1 791.  Secondly,  the  queen, 
who  must  have  known  better,  would  hardly  have 
called  Pitt  the  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer,  for, 
although  he  held  the  office,  he  was  known  by  his 
other  title  of  First  Lord  of  the  Treasury  ;  and 
thirdly,   it   is  improbable  that  he  would  have 


86  Four  Frenchwomen. 

spoken  so  harshly  and  discourteously  to  a  mem- 
ber of  that  royal  family  for  whom  his  interven- 
tion was  requested.  Other  proofs  follow  of  the 
neutral  attitude  of  England,  and  of  the  fact  that 
Marie  Antoinette  had  at  the  time  sources  of 
communication  with  this  country  besides  Ma- 
dame de  Lamballe.  The  first  of  these  reasons 
is  certainly  the  best.  It  might  indeed  be  possi- 
ble for  the  queen  to  have  made  the  second  mis- 
take, and  possibly  Pitt's  curt  answer  might  have 
become  "almost  in  express  terms"  unfeeling 
and  discourteous  after  passing  through  two 
ladies  who  dreaded  and  disliked  him — one  so 
much  that  she  "  could  never  pronounce  his 
name  without  a  shiver."  Combined  in  some 
five  lines,  however,  they  have  a  singularly  apoc- 
ryphal appearance,  and,  all  things  considered, 
the  passage  as  a  piiice  jusUficative  of  the  ob- 
ject of  Madame  de  Lamballe's  visit,  and  what 
her  biographer  calls  "  her  attempts  to  tame  and 
soothe  the  surly  selfishness  of  English  policy," 
can  scarcely  be  held  to  be  convincing. 

M.  de  Lescure  has  striven,  with  all  the  elo- 
quence of  enthusiasm,  to  impress  upon  us  the 
transformation  that  affection  now  wrought  in  the 
modest  and  retiring  princess.  He  would  have 
her  to  have  become  an  active  diplomatist  —  a 
delicate  feminine  Machiavel,  "  a  modest  Iris," 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  87 

yielding  only  to  fearful  disadvantage.  A  propos 
of  the  before-mentioned  Orleans  negotiation,  he 
enlarges  upon  this  idea  ;  and  again  d  propos  of 
the  English  mission,  he  calls  upon  us  to  admire 
the  "  sang-froid  "  of  the  "  discrHe,'"  the  *'  insin- 
uante,"  and  the  "  touchanle  Lamballe,''''  as  she 
"  grapples  with  the  distrustful  oppositions  of 
English  egoism."  But  the  hard  historical  Grad- 
grind  cries  for  facts.  Our  author  allows  that 
details  are  wanting  for  the  first  attempt,  while 
the  picturesque  diplomatic  attitude  of  the  princess 
in  England  seems  to  repose  entirely  upon  the 
foregoing  doubtful  extract  from  the  letter  of  the 
queen.  That  she  interested  herself  to  the  best 
of  her  ability  for  the  friends  she  had  left  in  so 
strange  and  sad  a  strait,  and  the  Marats  and 
Gorsas  and  Fr^rons  gave  her  every  credit  for 
her  efforts,  is  natural  ;  but  we  like  better  to 
think  that  it  was  not  her  mdtier  —  that,  to  use 
Mr.  Carlyle's  forcible  words,  "  the  piping  of  the 
small  silver  voice  "  was  ineffectual  "  in  the  black 
world-tornado."  To  a  Frenchman  it  may  seem 
painful  that  she  had  not  the  conspicuous  excel- 
lence of  Frenchwomen  or  Italians.  We  like 
her  better  so.  We  like  her  best  restless  and 
pining  in  her  English  exile,  longing  to  "throw 
herself  into  the  tiger's  jaws  " —  to  "  die  by  the 
side  of  the  queen." 


88  Four  Frenchwomen. 

The  queen,  however,  did  not  wish  her  to  re- 
turn. Letter  after  letter  reiterated  this  desire  — 
now  as  a  command,  now  as  an  entreaty.  "  I 
know  well  that  you  love  me,  and  I  have  no  need 
of  this  new  proof.  Quelle  bonheur  que  d'Hre 
aimie  pour  soi-meme  !  .  .  .  In  the  new  misfor- 
tunes that  overwhelm  me  it  is  a  consolation  to 
know  that  those  one  loves  are  in  safety.  .  .  . 
Don't  come  back,  my  dear  Lamballe,"  the  letters 
repeat.  ...  "I  can  only  tell  you  not  to  come 
back  ;  things  are  too  dreadful,  but  I  have  cour- 
age for  myself,  and  I  don't  know  whether  I 
could  have  it  for  my  friends  —  such  a  one  as 
yourself,  above  all.  ...  No,  once  more  I  say 
don't  come  back  ;  don't  throw  yourself  into  the 
tiger's  jaws."  "  Remain  where  you  are,"  writes 
the  king  ;  "we  shall  meet  at  a  future  time  with 
greater  pleasure.  Wait  for  a  little  time."  But 
it  was  no  longer  possible  for  the  princess  to  stay 
away.  "  The  queen  needs  me,  and  I  must  live 
or  die  at  her  side,"  she  said.  In  October  she 
made  her  will  at  Alx-la-Chapelle  —  a  will  in 
which  even  her  dogs  were  not  forgotten  —  and 
in  November  she  re-entered  France. 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  89 


IV. 


"  I  COMMEND  the  attachment  of  my  daughter- 
in-law  to  the  queen,"  said  the  old  duke  to  his 
valet  Fortaire  ;  "  she  has  made  a  very  great 
sacrifice  in  returning  to  her,  and  I  fear  she  will 
suffer  for  it."  He  was  to  see  her  again  but 
once.  She  left  him  in  November  to  rejoin  the 
royal  family  at  the  Tuileries  ;  she  returned  to  him 
for  a  few  days  in  the  May  following,  but  from 
that  time  her  life  is  bound  and  mingled  with  her 
friend's.  The  Countess  de  Polignac  had  yielded 
to  the  queen's  request  and  fled.  The  Abb6  de 
Vermond  was  gone.  The  fair-weather  Lauzuns 
and  Besenvals  were  gone  —  long  ago.  But  the 
nervous,  delicate  princess  rose  to  the  necessity 
with  an  intrepidity  of  affection  wonderful  in  one 
so  frail.  "  I  went  often  to  visit  her,"  says 
Madame  de  la  Rochejaquelein  ;  "  I  saw  all  her 
anxieties,  all  her  troubles  ;  there  was  never  any 
one  more  courageously  devoted  to  the  queen. 
She  had  made  sacrifice  of  her  life.  Just  before 
the  loth  of  August  she  said  to  me,  'The  more 
danger  increases,  the  stronger  I  feel.  I  am 
quite  ready  to  die  —  I  fear  nothing.'  "  .  .  .  "  The 
good  Lamballe,"  wrote  the  queen  to   Madame 


90  Four  Frenchwomen. 

de  Polignac,  "  seemed  only  to  wait  for  danger 
to  show  us  all  her  worth." 

When  at  the  second  attack  upon  the  Tuileries, 
in  June,  1792,  the  queen  sought  to  follow  the 
king,  whom  the  National  Guard  Aclocque  had 
persuaded  to  show  himself  to  the  people,  it  is 
Madame  de  Lamballe  who  whispers,  "  Madame, 
your  place  is  by  your  children,"  When,  again, 
the  crowd,  with  a  smashing  of  doors  and  furni- 
ture, surged  into  the  council-room  where  a 
handful  of  guards  had  barricaded  the  little  group 
with  the  great  table,  behind  which  the  pale  queen, 
with  Madame  Royale  pressed  to  one  side,  and 
the  wide-eyed  wondering  dauphin  on  the  other, 
stands  unmoved  by  scurrilous  words  and  threat- 
ening knives,  Madame  de  Lamballe  is  closest  of 
all  the  "  courtiers  of  misfortune."  It  is  Madame 
de  Lamballe  again,  who,  in  this  Pavilion  de  Flore 
of  the  Tuileries  which  she  gaily  styles  "  her  dun- 
geon," charges  herself  with  that  difficult  duty  of 
sifting  and  sorting  the  spirits  round  the  royal 
family,  of  retaining  only  the  devoted  followers, 
and  removing  doubtful  or  lukewarm  adherents 
from  a  palace  where  the  best  qualification  for 
servitude  was  the  willingness  to  die.  It  is 
Madame  de  Lamballe,  again,  who  passes,  tear- 
ful and  terrified,  on  M.  de  la  Rochefoucauld's 
arm  between  the  files  of  grenadiers  conducting 


The  Princess  de  Latnballe.  91 

the  king  to  that  insecure  refuge  of  the  Assembly. 
She  is  with  them  through  all  that  long  day  in  the 
ten-foot  oven  of  the  Logotach/graphe,  at  the 
close  of  which  the  queen,  asking  for  a  handker- 
chief, cannot  obtain  one  unsprinkled  with  blood. 
"  We  shall  come  back,"  Marie  Antoinette  had 
said  that  morning,  consoling  her  trembling  wo- 
men. But  Madame  de  Lamballe  had  no  such 
hope  when  she  told  her  escort  that  they  should 
never  see  the  Tuileries  again.  She  is  with  them 
in  the  cells  of  the  Feuillans  Convent ;  she  ac- 
companies them  to  the  Prison  of  the  Temple. 

Mesdames  St.,  Brice,  Thibaut,  and  Bazire, 
ladies-in-waiting  to  the  queen,  Madame  la  Mar- 
quise de  Tourzel,  and  Pauline  her  daughter, 
governesses  to  the  royal  children,  and  MM.  Hue 
and  Chamilly,  made  up  the  little  group  of  faith- 
ful servants  who  still  clung  to  royalty  in  disgrace. 
It  was  the  middle  of  August,  and  the  heat  was 
excessive.  Garments  of  every  kind  were  want- 
ing to  the  prisoners,  not  yet,  indeed,  acknowl- 
edged to  be  such,  but  treated  with  a  strange 
mingling  of  insolence  and  consideration  which 
betokened  the  disordered  state  of  those  about 
them.  In  the  hastily-prepared  apartments  of 
the  Feuillans  —  their  nightly  prison  during  their 
detention  by  the  Assembly  — the  king  had  slept 
with  a  napkin  round  his  head  for  a  nightcap. 


92  Four  Frenclrwomen. 

He  now  wore  the  coat  of  an  officer  of  the  Cent- 
Suisses,  while  the  dauphin  was  dressed  in  clothes 
belonging  to  the  son  of  the  Countess  of  Suther- 
land. Once  in  the  Temple,  various  communi- 
cations with  the  outer  world  became  necessary, 
in  order  to  procure  changes  of  dress.  All  sorts 
of  suspicions  were  aroused  by  this  proceeding. 
"  They  murmured  greatly  against  the  women 
who  had  followed  us,"  says  Madame  Royale. 
An  order  from  the  Commune  arrived  to  separate 
the  prisoners  ;  but  the  Procureur-Gen^ral  de  la 
Commune,  Manuel,  touched  by  the  queen's 
grief,  suspended  it  for  a  time.  The  pretext  of 
this  dangerous  correspondence  with  outsiders 
proved,  however,  too  desirable  to  be  passed 
over,  and  at  midnight  on  the  19th  of  August  an 
order  arrived  to  remove  from  the  Temple  all 
persons  not  belonging  to  the  royal  family.  The 
queen  vainly  objected  that  the  princess  was  her 
relation  ;  the  order  was  carried  into  effect,  and 
the  ladies  were  removed.  After  the  separation 
"  we  all  four  remained  unable  to  sleep,"  says 
Madame,  simply.  The  municipals  had  assured 
them  that  the  ladies  would  be  sent  back  after 
examination  ;  the  next  day,  at  seven,  they  were 
informed  that  they  had  been  transferred  to  the 
prison  of  the  Little  Force.  Only  M.  Hue,  re- 
turned for  a  sort  time  to  the  Temple. 


The  Princess  de  Lamhalle.  93 

Madame  de  Lamballe,  Madame  de  Tourzel, 
and  her  daughter,  were  taken  to  the  Commune, 
where  they  were  examined.  At  twelve  they 
were  taken  to  the  Force,  and  separated  ;  but 
they  were  afterwards  united  by  the  intervention 
of  Manuel.  Already  the  fate  of  the  princess 
seems  to  have  been  decided,  for  her  name  was 
underlined  in  the  prison  register. 

Meanwhile  the  inmates  of  the  Temple  had 
not  forgotten  them.  The  queen  herself,  on 
hearing  from  Manuel  of  their  detention,  had 
busied  herself  to  pack  them  up  clothes  and 
necessaries.  "  The  next  morning,"  says  Pauline 
de  Tourzel,  "  we  received  a  packet  from  the 
Temple  ;  it  contained  our  effects,  which  the 
queen  had  forwarded.  She  herself,  with  that 
goodness  which  never  failed,  had  taken  care  to 
collect  them.  .  .  .  The  inconvenience  of  our 
lodging,  the  horror  of  the  prison,  ..the  pain  of 
separation  from  the  king  and  his  family,  the 
severity  with  which  this  separation  seemed  to 
imply  we  should  be  treated,  all  these  things  to- 
gether depressed  me  greatly,  I  confess,  and  ex- 
tremely terrified  the  unfortunate  princess." 

We  pass  to  the  commencement  of  September. 
It  is  not  here  the  place  to  tell  the  story  of  the 
terrible  hundred  hours  during  which  the  Parisian 
mob,  in  an  agony  of  rage  and  fear  —  fear  of  the 


94  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

Prussian  at  Verdun,  fear  of  the  plotter  in  the 
city  —  massacred  in  a  systematic  butchery, 
winked  at  or  organised  by  the  Commune,  no 
less  than  fourteen  hundred  and  eighty  persons 
in  the  prisons  of  Paris.  On  the  2d  of  Septem- 
ber, at  breakfast  time,  our  captives  had  been 
told  that  "  passions  had  been  fermenting  in  Paris 
since  the  preceding  evening ;  that  massacres  were 
apprehended,  that  the  prisons  were  threatened, 
and  that  several  were  already  forced."  Towards 
midnight  on  the  same  day  commenced  the  mas- 
sacres at  La  Force. 

The  proceedings,  it  is  known,  were  not  con- 
ducted without  a  certain  parade,  or  rather  parody, 
of  reason  and  justice.  La  Force,  in  particular, 
had  a  complete  "  tribunal  of  the  people  "  sitting 
in  the  room  of  the  concierge,  and  having  a  presi- 
dent (changed  frequently  during  the  four  days' 
sitting),  six  or  seven  judges  (for  the  most  part 
emissaries  of  the  Commune),  and  a  public 
accuser.  Before  these  the  prisoner  appeared, 
was  hurriedly  examined,  and  speedily  judged. 
If  accounted  guilty  the  sentence  ran,  "  Let  the 
accused  be  discharged,"  or,  with  a  curious  irony, 
he  was  dismissed  d.  VAbbaye,  or  d  Coblent\,  and 
uncertain  of  his  fate,  was  pushed  through  the 
wicket,  and  behind  the  wicket  were  the  butchers. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  he  was  absolved  —  a  rare 


The  Princess  de  Lamhalle.  95 

exception  —  the  formula  was,  "  Let  him  "be  dis- 
charged, with  Vive  la  nation;"  he  was  dragged 
upon  a  pile  of  corpses,  "  the  worthy  altar  of 
Fraternity,"  and  obliged,  amidst  shouts  and 
cheers,  to  swear  the  civic  oath. 

Pauline  de  Tourzel  had  been  separated  from 
her  mother  some  hours  before,  and  saved.  The 
other  two  prisoners  remained  in  a  terrible  sus- 
pense, awaiting  the  death  of  which  there  seemed 
but  little  doubt.  They  were  fetched  at  last,  and 
taken  down  into  a  little  court  filled  by  a  number 
of  fierce-looking  men,  the  greater  number  of 
whom  were  drunk.  Madame  de  Tourzel  was 
called  to  the  assistance  of  a  fainting  lady,  and 
afterwards  led  to  the  tribunal.  She  was  exam- 
ined for  a  few  minutes,  then  hurried  through  the 
wicket,  just  catching  sight  of  the  pile  of  corpses 
which  choked  the  little  street,  and  upon  which 
stood  two  men  with  dripping  sabres,  and 
smuggled  away  to  rejoin  her  daughter.  In  the 
meantime,  Madame  de  Lamballe  had  been  trans- 
ferred to  the  adjoining  prison  of  the  Greater 
Force. 

It  is  not  easy  to  decide  whether  this  step  was 
taken  in  the  hope  of  saving  her,  or  whether  it 
was  intended  to  secure  her  thus  more  surely  to 
the  vengeance  of  her  assassins.  Mesdames  de 
Tourzel  were  certainly  preserved  by  emissaries 


96  Four  Frenchwomen. 

from  the  Commune.  Was  the  princess  included 
in  the  same  intention  ?  The  Duke  of  Penthi(^vre, 
we  know,  was  making  every  effort.  Looking 
to  the  result,  we  are  forced  to  believe  that 
her  death  had  been  decided.  We  pass,  how- 
ever, from  surmises  to  history,  and  take  up  her 
story  as  told  by  the  royalist  journalist,  Peltier. 
"This  unfortunate  princess,"  says  he,  "  having 
been  spared  [?]  on  the  night  of  the  2d,  had 
thrown  herself  upon  her  bed,  a  prey  to  all  kinds 
of  horrors  and  anxieties.  She  closed  her  eyes 
only  to  open  them  almost  immediately,  starting 
from  sleep  at  some  dreadful  dream.  About 
eight  o'clock  in  the  morning  two  national  guards 
entered  her  room,  to  announce  to  her  that  she 
was  about  to  be  transferred  to  the  Abbaye.  To 
this  she  replied  that,  prison  for  prison,  she  would 
as  soon  remain  where  she  was  as  remove  to 
another,  and  consequently  refused  to  come 
down,  begging  them  very  earnestly  to  let 
her  be. 

"One  of  the  guards  thereupon  approached, 
and  said  to  her  harshly  that  she  must  obey,  for 
her  life  depended  upon  it.  She  replied  that  she 
would  do  what  they  desired,  and  begging  those 
in  her  room  to  retire,  put  on  a  gown,  recalled 
the  national  guard,  who  gave  her  his  arm,  and 
went  down  to  the  formidable  wicket,  where  she 


The  Princess  de  Lamhalle.  97 

found,  invested  with  their  scarves,  the  two  muni- 
cipal officers  who  were  then  occupied  in  judging 
the  prisoners."  .  .  .  They  were  Hubert  and 
I'Huillier.  .  Arrived  before  this  implacable  tri- 
bunal, the  sight  of  the  dripping  weapons — of 
the  butchers,  whose  hands,  faces,  and  clothes 
were  stained  with  blood  —  the  shrieks  of  the 
wretches  who  were  being  murdered  in  the 
street,  so  overcame  her  that  she  fainted  repeat- 
edly. No  sooner  was  she  revived  by  the  care 
of  her  waiting-woman  than  she  lost  conscious- 
ness again.  When  at  last  she  was  in  a  state  to 
be  questioned,  they  made  semblance  of  com- 
mencing the  interrogatory.  This,  in  few  words, 
was  her  examination,  as  gathered  by  the  family 
of  the  princess  from  the  report  of  an  ocular 
witness  :  — 

"  Who  are  you  ?" 

"  Marie-Louise,  Princess  of  Savoy." 

"■  Your  capacity  ?  " 

"  Superintendent  of  the  Queen's  Household." 

"  Had  you  knowledge  of  the  plots  of  the  court 
on  the  tenth  of  August  ? " 

"  I  do  not  know  if  there  were  any  plots  on 
the  tenth  of  August,  but  I  know  that  I  had  no 
knowledge  of  them." 

"  Swear  liberty,  equality,  hatred  of  the  King, 
of  the  Queen,  and  of  royalty." 
7 


98  Four  Frenchwomen. 

*'  I  will  willingly  swear  the  first  two  ;  I  can- 
not swear  the  last :  it  is  not  in  my  heart."  (Here 
an  assistant  whispered,  "  Swear,  then  :  if  you 
don't  swear,  you  are  lost.")  The  princess  did 
not  answer,  lifted  her  hands  to  her  face,  and 
made  a  step  towards  the  wicket.  The  judge 
then  said,  "  Let  madame  be  discharged  "  {Qu  on 
dargisse  madame).  The  phrase,  as  we  know, 
was  the  signal  of  death,  A  report  has  been  cir- 
culated that  it  was  not  the  intention  of  the  judge 
to  send  her  to  execution,  but  those  who  wished 
by  this  to  extenuate  the  horror  of  her  death 
have  forgotten  what  precautions  were  taken  to 
save  her.  Some  say  that  when  the  wicket  was 
opened  she  had  been  recommended  to  cry  "  Vive 
la  nation ! "  but  that,  terrified  at  the  sight  of 
the  blood  and  corpses  that  met  her  eye,  she 
could  only  answer  "  Fi  V  horreur ! '"  and  that 
the  assassins,  applying  the  very  natural  excla- 
mation to  the  cry  they  demanded  of  her,  had 
struck  her  down  there  and  then.  Others  affirm 
that  at  the  door  of  the  wicket  she  only  uttered 
the  words  "  Je  suis  perdue.'" 

But,  however  this  may  be,  she  had  no  sooner 
crossed  the  threshold  than  she  was  struck.  "  J  ust 
at  this  moment,"  continues  another  narrator,  who 
adds  some  slight  details  to  the  foregoing  account 
of  Peltier,  which,  nevertheless,  seems  to  have 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  99 

served  him  as  a  basis  —  "just  at  this  moment 
one  of  the  ruffians  around  her  attempted  to  lift 
her  headdress  with  his  sabre,  but  as  he  lurched, 
drunk,  and  half-dazed  with  blood,  the  point  cut 
her  over  the  eye.  The  blood  gushed  out,  and 
her  long  hair  fell  upon  her  shoulders.  Two  men 
held  her  up  tightly  below  the  armpits,  and 
obliged  her  to  walk  upon  the  bodies.  ...  A 
few  cries  of  '  Grdce  !  Grdce  ! '  were  raised  by  a 
handful  of  the  spectators  posted  in  the  street, 
but  one  of  the  butchers,  crying  '  death  to  the 
disguised  lacqueys  of  the  -Duke  of  Penthievre  1  ' 
fell  upon  them  with  his  sabre.  Two  were  killed 
outright,  the  rest  found  safety  in  flight.  Almost 
at  the  same  instant  another  of  the  wretches,  with 
the  blow  of  a  club,  struck  down  the  princess  — 
senseless  between  the  men  who  held  her  up  — 
upon  the  heap  of  corpses  at  his  feet."  Her 
head  was  then  cut  off",  and  the  headsman, 
"  accompanied  by  some  of  his  fellows,  carried 
it  to  the  counter  of  a  neighbouring  marchand  de 
vin,  whom  they  tried  to  force  into  drinking 
its  health.  The  man  refusing  was  maltreated, 
dragged  upon  a  heap  of  bodies,  and  com- 
pelled, with  the  knife  at  his  throat,  to  cry 
'  Vive  la  nation ! '  "  When  he  returned  home 
his  shop  was  empty  ;  the  mob  had  carried  off 
everything. 


loo  Four  Frenchwomen. 

We  have  neither  intention  nor  inclination  to 
detail  the  further  atrocities  to  which  the  body 
was  subjected.  It  is  sufficient  to  say  that 
towards  mid-day  the  mob  resolved  to  carry  the 
head  in  triumph.  Having  forced  a  hairdresser 
to  comb,  curl,  and  powder  it,  in  order  that  the 
Autrichienne  might  recognise  the  face,  they  lifted 
it  upon  a  pike,  formed  into  a  procession  with 
drums  and  fifes,  headed  by  a  boy  and  an  old  man 
dancing  like  maniacs,  and  accompanied  by  a 
gathering  crowd  of  men,  women,  and  children  — 
ragged,  blood-stained^-and  drunken  —  shrieking 
at  intervals  ^^  Laniballe !  Lamballe!'"  and  pil- 
laging the  wine-shops  as  they  went,  they  bore 
their  trophy  through  the  streets  of  Paris  —  Paris 
that  looked  on,  inactive  and  in  stupor,  during 
the  whole  of  these  four  days  of  infamy  and 
carnage. 

History  and  romance  are  strangely  mingled  in 
the  story  of  this  horrible  procession.  It  seems 
clear,  however,  that  they  carried  the  head  first  to 
the  Abbey  St.  Antoine,  the  abbess  of  which, 
Madame  de  Beauvau,  had  been  a  friend  of 
Madame  de  Lamballe.  They  then  —  and  this 
is  certain  —  took  it  to  the  Temple  to  exhibit  it 
to  Marie  Antoinette.  The  sight  —  though  not 
the  knowledge  —  was  spared  the  queen  by  those 
about  her;  but  the  king's  valet,  C16ry,  saw  it 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe,  loi 

*  bloody,  but  not  disfigured,  with  the  fair  hair 
curling  yet,  and  floating  round  the  pike-shaft," 
as  it  tossed  to  and  fro  above  the  cruel  faces  and 
upturned  eyeballs  of  the  crowd  who  filled  the 
trampled  Temple  garden,  and  yelled  for  Madame 
Veto.  It  is  certain,  too,  that  it  was  borne  as  a 
grim  homage  to  Philip  EgaliU,  who  was  just 
sitting  down  to  dinner  in  the  Palais  Royal, 
where  shameless  Madame  de  Buffon  fell  back- 
ward, shrieking  from  her  chair,  her  face  covered 
with  her  hands,  "  AA,  mon  Dieu!  ma  tSte  se 
promenera  un  jour  de  cette  manure  I "  Where 
else  and  with  what  other  incidents  until  at  last 
it  was  conveyed  away  by  the  emissaries  of  the 
Duke  de  Penthi^vre  to  the  Cemetery  of  the 
Foundlings,  cannot  further  with  any  accuracy 
be  related.  Of  the  life  of  Madame  de  Lamballe 
our  readers  know  all  that  we  can  tell  them,  and 
we  have  added  nothing  to  the  horror  of  her 
death. 

Not  a  grand  death,  we  hasten  to  add,  by  any 
means.  Not  dramatic,  for  example,  in  a  white 
dress  parsemde  de  bouquets  de  couleur  rose,  with 
longings  for  pen  and  ink  to  chronicle  her  feelings. 
Not  an  august  progress  through  a  rancorous 
mob,  in  a  scarlet  shirt,  like  *'  Vengeance  sanc- 
tified." She  has  left  us  no  political  apologia, 
no  address  to  the  French  people,  with  a  ring  of 


I02  Four  Frenchwomen. 

"  Quousque  tandem''''  in  it  by  which  we  are  to 
remember  her  ;  no  eloquent  appeal  to  an  im- 
partial posterity  by  which  we  are  to  judge  her. 
Yet  judge  her  harshly  we  shall  not  —  remember 
her  we  shall  most  certainly  as  one  who  was 
"  aussi  bonne  que  jolie  ;  "  as  "  the  good  Lamballe, 
who  only  needed  danger  to  show  us  all  her 
worth  ;  "  as  a  genuine  woman  and  ill-fated  lady, 
who  was  as  lovable  as  Virgilia,  as  pure  as 
Imogen,  and  as  gentle  as  Desdemona.  "  She 
was  beautiful,  she  was  good,  she  had  known  no 
happiness,"  says  Carlyle.  Shall  we  not  pity  her  ? 
Pious  where  piety  was  useless,  except  as  the 
cloak  to  hide  an  interest  ;  chaste  in  a  court  of 
rouis  and  panders,  where  chastity  was  a  "  pre- 
judice ;  "  a  tender  wife,  a  loving  daughter,  and 
a  loyal  friend,  —  shall  we  not  here  lay-  down 
upon  the  grave  of  Marie  de  Lamballe  our  rever- 
ential tribute,  our  little  chaplet  of  immortelles,  in 
the  name  of  all  good  women,  wives,  and 
daughters  ? 

"  Elle  itail  mieux  femme  que  les  aulres."  To 
us  that  apparently  indefinite,  exquisitely  definite 
sentence  most  fitly  marks  the  distinction  between 
the  subjects  of  the  two  preceeding  papers  and 
the  subject  of  the  present.  It  is  a  transition 
from  the  stately  sitting  figure  of  a  marble  Agrip- 


The  Princess  de  Lamballe.  103 

pina  to  the  breathing,  feeling  woman  at  your 
side  ;  it  is  the  transition  from  the  statuesque, 
Rachelesque  heroines  of  a  David  to  the  "  small 
sweet  idyl"  of  a  Greuze.  And,  we  confess  it, 
we  were  not  wholly  at  ease  with  those  tragic, 
majestic  figures.  We  shuddered  at  the  dagger 
and  the  bowl  which  suited  them  so  well.  We 
marvelled  at  their  bloodless  serenity,  their  super- 
human self-suflRciency  ;  inly  we  questioned  if 
they  breathed  and  felt.  Or  was  their  circula- 
tion a  matter  of  machinery  —  a  mere  dead-beat 
escapement  ?  We  longed  for  the  sexe  pro- 
nonci  of  Rivarol  —  we  longed  for  the  show- 
man's "  female  woman."  We  respected  and  we 
studied,  but  we  could  not  love  them. 

With  Madame  de  Lamballe  the  case  is  other- 
wise. Not  grand  like  this  one,  not  heroic  like 
that  one,  elle  est  mieux  femme  que  ces  autres. 
She,  at  least,  is  woman —  after  a  fairer  fashion  — 
after  a  truer  type.  Not  intellectually  strong  like 
Manon  Phlipon,  not  Spartan-souled  like  Marie 
de  Corday,  she  has  still  a  rare  intelligence,  a 
courage  of  affection.  She  has  that  clairvoyance 
of  the  heart  which  supersedes  all  the  stimulants 
of  mottoes  from  Raynal,  or  maxims  from  Rous- 
seau ;  she  has  that  "  angel  instinct  "  which  is  a 
juster  lawgiver  than  Justinian.  It  was  thought 
praise  to  say  of  the  Girondist  lady  that  she  was  a 


104  Fowr  Frenchwomen. 

greater  man  than  her  husband  ;  it  is  praise  to  say 
of  this  queen's  friend  that  she  was  more  woman 
than  Madame  Roland.  Not  so  grand,  not  so 
great,  we  lilce  the  princess  best.  Elle  est  mieux 
jfemme  que  ces  autres. 


MADAME  DE  GENUS. 
1746-1830. 


" A  learned  lady,  famed 

For  every  branch  of  every  science  known  — 

In  every  Christian  language  ever  named, 
With  virtues  equall'd  by  her  wit  alone : 

She  made  the  cleverest  people  quite  ashamed, 
And  even  the  good  with  inward  envy  groan, 
Finding  themselves  so  very  much  exceeded 
In  their  own  way  by  all  the  things  that  she  did." 

Don  yuan,  canto  i.  s.  lo. 

"  Unefemme  auteur  —  le  plus  gracieux  et  le  plus 
galant  des  pedagogues  ^ 

Sainte-Beuve. 


MADAME   DE   GENLIS. 
I. 

n^HE  portrait  of  Mademoiselle  Stephanie- 
■'•  Felicit^-Ducrest  de  Saint-Aubin,  otherwise 
Madame  de  Sillery-Genlls,  which  is  inserted 
in  Sainte-Beuve's  Galerie  des  Femmes  CdUbres, 
does  not,  at  first  sight,  appear  to  support  the 
quotations  chosen  for  this  paper.  Indeed  —  re- 
membering her  only  as  the  respectable  precep- 
tress who  had  prepared  a  King  of  France  for 
the  hardships  and  privations  of  a  coming  throne 
by  perfecting  him  in  the  difficult  accomplishments 
of  sleeping  comfortably  upon  a  plank,  and  walk- 
ing leagues  with  leaden  soles  to  his  boots  —  we 
confess  to  having  been  somewhat  startled  by  her 
personal  advantages.  This  could  never  be  the 
epicene  genius  whom  Rivarol  had  twitted  —  the 
omniscient  matron  who  had  reserved  for  her  old 
age  the  task  of  re-writing  the  E ncy clop i die. 
O  Dea  cede  !  we  had  said,  but  then  it  was 
not  Venus  that  we  thought  of.  Surely  a 
stately  presence,  surely  a  personality  preter- 
naturally  imposing,   Minerva-like,  august  —  say 


io8  Four  Frenchwomen. 

like  Madame  Dacier,  whom  we  passed  in  seek- 
ing. Not  at  all  1  A  sham  berg^re  simply,  from 
some  rile  Adam  or  Chantilly  fSte  —  some 
batelUre  de  Vile  d' Amour.  A  sidelong,  self-con- 
scious, wide-eyed  head,  with  a  ribbon  woven  in 
the  well-dressed  hair  —  with  the  complexion  of 
a  miniature  and  the  simper  of  Dresden  china. 
The  figure  "  languishes  "  with  a  cultivated  aban- 
don. One  hand  trifles  elegantly  with  a  ringlet, 
the  other  falls  with  a  graceful  droop  across  her 
harp-strings.  '*  Je  suis  excessivemenl  joUe,"'  she 
seemed  to  say  with  a  little  confirmatory  vibra- 
tion of  a  chord.  If  this  is  Erox^ne  or  Mdlicerte, 
she  manages  to  wear  her  fichu  with  a  "  wild 
civility  "  that  Myrtillo  must  find  delightfully  un- 
puritanic  and  enticing.  If  this  is  the  simple  shep- 
herd beauty,  then  heads  must  ferment  as  freely 
in  Arcadia  as  in  Palais  Royal  salons,  for  the 
modelled  features  have  been  excellently  tutored, 
and  the  educated  smile  is  most  artistically  con- 
ceived. But  there  is  a  book  by  her  side,  behind 
by  the  leafy  trellis  rises  an  easel,  and  this  is 
Madame  la  Comtesse  de  Genlis  —  the  accom- 
plished author,  the  governor  of  Louis  Philippe, 
and  the  counsellor  of  Bonaparte,  very  amiably 
self-satisfied,  very  characteristically  posed,  and 
•'  our  mind's  eye  "  is  altogether  in  the  wrong. 
We  send  off  for  her  Memoirs,  and  study  them 


Madame  de  Gen  lis.  109 

attentively.  "What  has  been  discovered,  with  her 
assistance  will  be  presently  disclosed,  but  just  for 
a  few  lines  it  is  needful  to  digress  concerning 
Madame  de  Genlis  in  her  capacity  of  writer. 

For  she  was  a  writer  above  all,  this  simpering, 
self-contented  shepherdess  whom  we  had  mis- 
judged so  sadly.  "  She  would  have  invented 
the  inkstand,"  says  M.  Sainte-Beuve,  "if  the 
inkstand  had  been  uninvented."  Not  only  did 
she  scribble  incessantly,  but  on  themes  most 
discordant  and  opposite.  "  Madame  de  Genlis," 
says  a  contemporary,  "  has  written  enormously. 
She  has  essayed  almost  every  style,  from  the 
fugitive  piece  to  the  bulky  alphabetical  compil- 
ation, from  the  roman-poeme  to  the  treatise  on 
domestic  economy  and  the  collection  of  receipts 
for  the  kitchen.  She  has  discoursed  for  the  edu- 
cation of  princes  and  of  lacqueys  ;  she  has  pre- 
pared maxims  for  the  throne  and  precepts  for 
the  pantry.  And  if  we  add  to  the  variety  of  her 
productions  the  not  less  extraordinary  diversity 
of  her  talents,  and  the  marvels  of  her  industry 
—  ranging  from  wicker-work  baskets  to  wigs  d 
la  brigadi^re — we  must  certainly  concede  to 
Madame  la  Comtesse  the  gift  of  universality." 

At  this  distance  of  time,  very  little  more  than 
the  reputation  of  universality  remains.  To  use 
a  homely    figure,    Madame    la    Comtesse   was 


no  Four  Frenchwomen. 

"Jack,  of  all  trades  and  master  of  none"  —  a 
living  exposition  of  the  proverb,  "  Qui  dil  ama- 
teur, dit  ignorant.'"  With  infinite  curiosity, 
industry,  and  energy,  and  a  vanity  of  science 
fed  and  fostered  by  her  singular  confidence  in 
her  own  abilities,  she  frittered  away  her  talents 
—  the  undoubted  talents  she  undoubtedly  had  — 
in  numberless  works  of  Vv'hich  barely  the  list 
survives  in  the  columns  of  a  bibliographical  dic- 
tionary. She  beat  out  her  fine  gold  into  the 
flattest  and  flimsiest  of  leaf,  and  the  leaves  bound 
together  form  some  eighty  or  ninety  volumes. 
Once  and  again,  perhaps,  a  novel  bearing  her 
name  crops  up  in  some  new  venture  of  French 
classics,  yet  it  is  but  rarely,  now-a-days,  that 
one  meets  with  any  of  the  numerous  literary 
ofl"spring  of  the  prolific  genius  who  had  lived  as 
many  years  and  written  as  many  volumes  as  her 
great  adversary,  Voltaire. 

They  need  not  detain  us  long,  those  **  many 
volumes."  Fuit  is  written  everywhere  upon 
that  forgotten  fame.  The  dust  lies  over  it  as 
deep  as  on  the  CUUe  of  her  childhood  from 
which  she  first  drew  inspiration.  Few  seekers 
part  the  leaves  in  that  Arcadia  Deserta ;  its 
arbours  are  uninhabitable,  and  its  ornaments  out 
of  date.  Erminias  and  Darmances  sigh  after  a 
sterner  fashion  in  modern  novels  :    no   Mayfair 


Madame  de  Gerilis.  in 

lover  drinks  down  the  dried-up  bouquet  from  his 
fair  one's  bosom  "■  instead  of  tea."  An  enter- 
prising herborist,  perchance,  might  collect  from 
its  barren  abundance  a  horlus-siccus  of  faded  sen- 
timents ;  a  literary  Livingstone,  maybe,  might 
pry  amongst  its  mazes  for  Scuderi's  Fleuve 
du  Tendre,  but  for  the  ordinary  latter-day  reader 
its  hour  has  struck.  Only  a  few  semi-educa- 
tional works —  Addle  et  Theodore,  Le  Theatre 
de  r Education,  Les  VeilUes  du  ChAteau,  Les 
Legons  d'une  Gouvernante  ;  two  or  three  histori- 
cal romances  —  Mademoiselle  de  Lafayetle, 
Madame  de  Maintenon,  La  Duchesse  de  la  Val- 
lidre  ;  and  a  short  novelette  —  Mademoiselle  de 
Clermont,  which  is  held  to  be  her  masterpiece, 
have  been  singled  out  by  the  indulgence  of 
modern  criticism.  To  these  for  the  present 
purpose  we  venture  to  add  the  eight  volumes  of 
Memoirs,  and  the  delightful  little  collection  of 
anecdotes  and  recollections  entitled  Souvenirs  de 
Fdicie. 

The  Souvenirs  de  Fdlicie  appeared  at  a  fortu- 
nate moment.  In  1804  France  had  passed 
through  the  Revolution,  the  Terror,  and  the  Di- 
rectory, and  was  nearing  the  Empire.  The  Par- 
isians of  1804  were  leagues  away  from  the 
old  gallant  and  gay  noblesse  that  danced,  and 
drank,  and  acted  so  light-heartedly  through  that 


112  Four  Frenchwomen. 

"  Neapolitan  festival  "  of  theirs.  Their  soldier- 
successors  were  not  unwilling  to  hear  of  them 
again.  Madame  la  Comtesse  had  been  with 
them  and  of  them,  and  these  extracts  from  her 
journals,  sprightly  and  readable,  had  a  merited 
success.  The  volume  even  now  is  excessively 
amusing,  and  its  semi-anonymous  character  pre- 
serves it  somewhat  from  the  tiresome  and  intru- 
sive egotism  that  disfigures  the  Memoirs. 

It  was  twenty  years  after  that  she  published 
the  Memoirs,  when  she  was  growing  a  rather 
slatternly  old  lady  of  fourscore.  In  these  eight 
volumes  she  discourses  in  easy  stages,  reproduc- 
ing and  diluting  her  recollections.  Their  worst 
fault  is  their  bulk  ;  their  garrulity  one  can  almost 
pardon,  for  it  helps  us  to  the  character  of  the 
writer.  She  is  herself  the  matter  of  her  book, 
to  use  the  expression  of  Montaigne.  She  seems 
to  have  said,  in  the  witty  words  of  the  younger 
Pliny,  "  I  have  no  time  to  write  a  short  letter, 
so  I  must  e'en  write  along  one."  Nevertheless, 
her  gossipings  reward  perusal.  They  constitute 
a  great  magazine  of  pre-revolutionary  anecdote 
—  they  abound  in  curious  details  of  the  manners 
and  pastimes  of  the  day  —  they  are  full  of  clever 
appreciations  (which  have  been  called  deprecia- 
tions, and  are  none  the  worse)  of  those  trained 
talkers  and  brilliant  beauties  of  the  salons  who 


Madame  de  Genlis.  113 

had  the  Encyclopddistes  for  teachers  and  the 
Marechale  de  Luxembourg  for  oracle  of  tone  — 
the  *'  good  company,"  the  "  grand  society  "  of 
ancient  France  which  "  Europe  came  to  copy, 
and  vainly  strove  to  imitate," 

As  she  describes  it,  "  Assume  a  virtue  if  you 
have  it  not,"  appears  to  have  been  its  motto. 
Neither  a  stainless  life  nor  a  superior  merit  vv^as 
indispensable  to  its  elect.  This  sect,  of  supreme 
authority  in  all  matters  of  etiquette,  morality, 
and  taste,  admitted  into  its  charmed  circle  both 
sheep  and  goat  alike,  provided  they  possessed 
certain  superficial  elegance  of  manner  —  a  cer- 
tain distinctive  hall-mark  of  rank  or  riches,  court- 
credit  or  capacity.  Its  members  had  carried 
the  art  of  savoir-vivre  to  an  excellence  unprece- 
dented save  in  their  own  country.  Good  taste 
had  taught  them  to  imitate  the  graces  out  of  pure 
amenity  —  to  observe  restrictions,  if  only  for  the 
sake  of  convenience.  To  counterfeit  gentleness, 
decency,  reserve,  modesty,  toleration,  and  amia- 
bility—  the  outward  and  visible  signs  of  good 
manners  —  seemed  to  be  the  surest  method  of 
attaining  their  end,  which  was  at  once  to  de- 
light and  to  enthrall.  They  had  combined  all 
the  fashions  of  pleasing  and  of  interesting  with  a 
marvellous  adroitness.  Discussion  in  their  con- 
versation rarely  or  never  degenerated  into  dis- 


114  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

pute  ;  they  had  banished  scandal  from  their 
meetmgs  as  jarring  with  the  suavity  of  manner 
which  every  one  affected.  Their  politeness  had 
all  the  urbanity  and  ease  of  a  habit  acquired  in 
childhood,  and  fostered  by  nicety  of  character. 
They  had  learned  to  protect  without  patronising  ; 
to  listen  with  a  flattering  attention  ;  to  praise 
without  being  either  fulsome  or  insipid  ;  to  wel- 
come a  compliment  without  either  receiving  or 
rejecting  it ;  and  they  had  thus  created  a  com- 
munity which  was  quoted  all  over  Europe  as  the 
most  perfect  model  of  refinement,  of  elegance, 
and  of  nobility.  Admit  that  its  charm  was  only 
veneer  —  veneer  that  shammed  solidity  —  yet 
was  it  a  veneer  so  rare  and  smooth,  so  sweetly 
aromatic  and  so  delicate  in  grain,  susceptible  of 
so  brilliant  and  so  dazzling  a  polish,  tha't  easy- 
going people  might  well  be  pardoned  if  they 
mistook  it  for  —  nay,  very  possibly  preferred  it 
to  —  the  less  attractive  excellences  of  the  genu- 
ine rosewood  or  walnut. 

But  we  linger  too  long.  It  must  be  our  ex- 
cuse that  it  is  chiefly  from  this  social  point  of 
view  —  as  records  of  bygone  manners  —  that  we 
have  considered  Madame  de  Genlis's  Memoirs. 
Taking  upon  ourselves  little  more  than  the 
modest  office  of  Chorus,  we  propose  to  accom- 
pany her  through  these  her  chronicles.      We 


Madame  de  Genlis.  115 

shall  ask  no  pardon  if  we  digress.  Madame  la 
Comtesse  loses  her  own  way  so  often  that  it  is 
difficult  not  to  stray  in  following  her  footsteps. 


II. 


It  was  in  January,  1746  —  or,  to  be  histori- 
cally precise,  on  the  25th  of  January,  1746  — 
that  Madame  de  Genlis  "  gave  herself  the  trouble 
to  be  born."  The  phrase  is  used  advisedly,  for 
she  undoubtedly  belonged  to  that  happy  class 
who,  as  Beaumarchais  alleged,  had  only  to  go 
through  this  trifling  and  unimportant  preliminary 
in  order  to  insure  the  success  of  their  future 
lives.  In  common  with  most  of  the  great 
geniuses  of  her  age,  as  Voltaire,  Rousseau, 
Newton  —  and  we  marvel  that  her  complacent 
vanity  has  omitted  to  point  the  comparison  — 
she  came  into  the  world  so  small  and  sickly  that 
she  was  obliged  to  be  pinned  up  in  a  pillow  for 
v/armth.  In  this  condition,  M.  le  Bailli,  coming 
to  make  his  compliments  to  her  parents,  and 
being  short  of  sight,  all  but  sat  down  upon  the 
very  chair  in  which  the  future  governor  of  kings 
and  counsellor  of  emperors  had  been  placed  for 
safety. 

Her  father,  M.  de  St.  Aubin,  was  a  gentle- 


ii6  Four  Frenchwomen. 

man  of  Burgundy.  He  held  a  little  estate  at 
Champceri,  near  Autun  ;  but  when  his  daughter 
was  about  six  years  old  he  purchased  the  marqui- 
sate  of  St.  Aubin,  and  removed  to  the  tumble- 
down chateau  of  that  name  which  lay  on  the 
banks  of  the  Loire,  and  was  so  skilfully  designed 
that  the  river  could  not  be  perceived  from  any 
of  its  windows  Her  mother,  a  Mademoiselle 
de  Mezi^res,  seems  to  have  troubled  herself 
very  little  —  being  greatly  preoccupied  with  the 
exigencies  of  an  idle  life  —  about  her  daughter's 
education.  Her  father,  she  says,  confined  him- 
self to  overcoming  her  antipathy  to  insects, 
*'  particularly  spiders  and  frogs."  (!)  Until  she 
came  to  St.  Aubin  she  seems  to  have  been  left 
almost  entirely  to  the  femmes-de-chambre,  of 
whom  there  were  four  (a  fact  which  seems  to 
imply  that  M.  de  St.  Aubin's  income  of  loo/,  a 
year  must  have  been  infinitely  more  elastic  than 
at  present),  who  instructed  her  in  the  Catechism, 
and  in  addition  filled  her  head  with  romances 
and  fanciful  stories.  At  St.  Aubin  she  was  for 
a  time  consigned  to  the  village  schoolmistress, 
who  taught  her  to  read.  "As  I  had  a  very 
good  memory,  I  learned  rapidly,  and  at  the  end 
of  six  or  seven  months  I  read  fluently."  She 
then  had  a  governess  from  Brittany,  Mademoi- 
selle de  Mars,  under  whose  auspices  she  con- 


Madame  de  Genii's.  117 

tinued  the  study  of  the  Catechism,  a  little  history, 
a  little  music,  a  great  deal  of  Mademoiselle  de 
Scud^ri's  CUlie,  and  the  now  forgotten  tragedies 
of  Mademoiselle  Marie-Anne  Barbier.  "Writing 
she  taught  herself  afterwards,  at  the  age  of 
eleven. 

Even  at  this  time  she  displayed  the  ruling 
passions  of  her  life  for  scribbling  and  teaching. 
At  eight,  she  says,  long  before  she  could  write, 
she  was  already  dictating  little  romances  and 
comedies  to  Mademoiselle  de  Mars  ;  and  we 
find  her  clandestinely  keeping  a  school  of  little 
urchins  who  came  to  cut  rushes  under  the  ter- 
race before  her  bedroom,  on  those  days  when 
her  governess  was  occupied  with  her  home 
correspondence  :  — 

"  I  soon  took  it  into  my  head  to  give  them 
lessons  —  that  is  to  say,  to  teach  them  what  I 
knew  myself  —  the  Catechism,  a  verse  or  two 
of  Mademoiselle  Barbier's  tragedies,  and  what  I 
had  learned  by  heart  of  the  elements  of  music. 
Leaning  upon  the  wall  of  the  terrace,  I  gave 
them  these  fine  lessons  in  the  gravest  way  in  the 
world.  I  had  a  great  deal  of  trouble  in  making 
them  speak  the  verses,  on  account  of  their  Bur- 
gundian  patois;  but  I  was  patient,  and  they  were 
docile.  My  little  pupils,  ranged  along  the  wall 
among  the  reeds  and  rushes,  nose  in  air  in  order 


ii8  Four  Frenchwomen. 

to  see  me,  listened  with  the  greatest  attention, 
for  I  promised  them  rewards,  and  in  fact  threw 
them  down  fruit,  little  cakes,  and  all  kinds  of 
trifles.  ...  At  last  Mademoiselle  de  Mars  sur- 
prised me  one  day  in  the  midst  of  my  academy. 
She  did  not  scold  me,  but  she  laughed  so  heartily 
at  the  way  in  which  my  pupils  repeated  the 
poetry,  that  she  entirely  put  me  out  of  conceit 
with  my  learned  functions." 

At  this  time  she  was  called  the  Countess  de 
Lancy.  A  year  before,  her  mother  had  carried 
her  to  Paris,  where,  according  to  the  prevailing 
code  of  fashion,  she  had  been  tortured  by  den- 
tists, squeezed  by  staymakers  in  the  orthodox 
strait-waistcoats,  pinched  in  tight  shoes,  com- 
pelled to  wear  goggles  for  squinting,  and  deco- 
rated with  an  iron  collar  to  correct  hei-  country 
attitudes.  Moreover,  she  learned  to  wear  a 
hoop  ;  a  master  was  hired  to  teach  her  to  walk, 
and  she  was  forbidden  to  run,  to  jump,  and  to  ask 
questions.  For  the  child  of  17^0  only  differed 
from  her  mother  in  this  —  that  she  was  seen 
through  the  wrong  end  of  the  opera-glass.  Sub- 
sequently our  heroine  had  been  taken  to  Lyons 
for  the  purpose  of  procuring  her  reception  as  a 
canoness  in  the  neighbouring  chapter  of  Alix  — 
a  kind  of  honorary  novitiate  very  much  h  la 
mode    among    the    nobility,  which  left  to  the 


Madame  de  Genlis.  119 

novice  the  option  of  later  taking  the  vows  ;  but, 
in  any  case,  gave  her  the  advantage  of  certain 
privileges  and  decorations.  She  thus  describes 
her  reception  in  the  church  of  the  chapter  :  — 

*'  All  the  sisters  —  dressed  in  the  fashion  of 
the  day,  but  wearing  black  silk  gowns  over 
hoops,  and  large  cloaks  lined  with  ermine  — 
were  in  the  choir.  A  priest,  styled  the  grand 
prior,  examined  us  "  [her  cousin  was  admitted 
at  the  same  time],  "  made  us  repeat  the  Credo, 
and  afterwards  kneel  down  on  velvet  cushions. 
It  was  then  his  duty  to  cut  off  a  little  lock  of 
hair ;  but  as  he  was  very  old  and  almost  blind, 
he  gave  me  a  little  snip,  which  I  bore  heroically 
without  a  murmur,  until  it  was  at  last  found  out 
by  the  bleeding  of  my  ear.  This  done,  he  put 
on  my  finger  a  consecrated  gold  ring,  and  fas- 
tened on  my  head  a  little  piece  of  black-and- 
white  stuff,  about  three  inches  long,  which  the 
canonesses  termed  a  husband  "  [un  mari].  *'  He 
then  invested  me  with  the  insignia  of  the  order, 
—  a  red  ribbon  with  a  beautiful  enamelled  cross, 
and  a  broad  black  watered  sash.  This  cere- 
mony finished,  he  addressed  us  briefly,  after 
which  we  saluted  all  the  canonesses,  and  then 
heard  high  mass.  From  this  moment  I  was 
called  Madame  la  Comtesse  de  Lancy  "  [a  rank 
to  which  the  canonesses  of  Alix  were  entitled]. 


I20  Four  Frenchwomen. 

**  My  father  was  lord  of  Bourbon-Lane/"  [a 
town  some  two  leagues  from  St.  Aubin],  "  and 
for  this  reason  the  name  was  given  to  me.  The 
pleasure  of  hearing  myself  called  madame  afforded 
me  more  delight  than  all  the  rest." 

The  most  important  business  of  her  childhood 
seems  to  have  been  one  in  which  she  always  ap- 
pears, wittingly  and  unwittingly,  to  have  greatly 
excelled,  namely,  acting.  "We  need  scarcely  say 
that  France,  during  the  latter  half  of  the  cen- 
tury especially,  went  mad  for  private  theatricals. 
All  the  world  —  the  great  world,  of  course,  and 
not  the  mere  hemisphere  —  was  most  emphati- 
cally a  stage.  No  country  house  but  had  its 
company  of  comedians,  no  farmer-general  but 
had  his  carpenters  and  scene-painters.  There 
were  countesses  who  rivalled  Clairon,  and 
princes  who  rivalled  Pr^ville.  There  were 
theatres  everywhere  —  at  Chantilly,  at  Villers- 
Cotterets,  at  I'lle  Adam,  at  Little  Trianon  — 
nay,  for  so  does  the  fashion  fix  its  stamp  upon 
the  age,  even  in  that  far  tropical  Arcadia  of 
theirs  we  shall  find  Paul  and  Virginia  acting 
Boaz  and  Ruth,  to  the  sound  of  a  tom-tom, 
among  the  palms  and  ebony-trees  of  the  Mau- 
ritius. *'To  play  comedy  well,"  says  M.  Bar- 
ri^re  in  his  Preface  to  the  Souvenirs  de  Fdlicie, 
*•  became  the  all-important  business  —  the  na- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  121 

tional  movement,  as  it  were,  of  this  singular 
epoch.  It  seemed  as  if  France,  involved  under 
Louis  XV.  in  her  finances,  disgraced  in  her  po- 
litical relations,  and  (hardest  to  believe  ! )  fallen 
from  her  military  reputation,  no  longer  attached 
value,  interest,  or  glory  except  to  theatrical  suc- 
cesses. The  taste  for  acting  had  absorbed  all 
classes,  levelled  all  distinctions,  connected  and 
confounded  all  ranks  of  society." 

At  the  present  moment,  however,  it  is  with  a 
certain  Burgundian  company  that  we  are  more 
particularly  concerned.  In  1755,  M.  de  St. 
Aubin,  growing  tired  of  the  country,  had  gone 
to  Paris  for  six  months  (these  separations  of 
husband  and  wife  being  quite  en  rdgle,  if  not  de 
rigueur),  and  her  mother,  the  better  to  employ 
the  tedious  hours  of  alienation,  began  at  the 
end  of  two  months  to  prepare  a  fete  for  his 
return.  But  —  place  aux  dames  —  Madame  la 
Comtesse  de  Lancy  shall  speak  for  herself  : — 

"  She"  [her  mother]  "  composed  a  kind  of 
comic  opera  in  the  pastoral  style,  with  a  mytho- 
logical prologue  in  which  I  played  Cupid.  All 
her  lady's-maids  —  and  she  had  four,  all  young 
and  pretty  —  took  part  in  it.  Besides  this  a 
tragedy  was  attempted,  and  they  chose  Iphigenie 
en  Aulide  '"  [Racine]  ;  "  my  mother  took  Clytem- 
nestra,  and  the  part  of  Iphigenia  was  given  to 


122  Four  Frenchwomen. 

me.  A  medical  man  of  Bourbon-Lancy,  named 
Pinot,  played  Agamemnon,  and  his  eldest  son, 
a  youth  of  eighteen,  had  a  prodigious  success 
in  the  character  of  the  impetuous  Achilles.  .  .  . 
My  mother,  in  order  to  provide  the  requisite 
costumes,  cut  up  her  dresses  in  the  most  ruthless 
manner.  I  shall  never  forget  that  my  Cupid's 
dress  in  the  prologue  was  pink,  covered  with 
point-lace  sprinkled  all  over  with  little  artificial 
flowers  of  different  colours  ;  it  reached  down  to 
my  knees.  I  had  little  boots  of  straw  colour  and 
silver,  my  long  hair  fell  upon  my  shoulders,  and 
I  had  blue  wings.  My  Iphigenia's  dress,  over  a 
large  hoop  "  [Iphigenia  in  a  large  hoop  I  ]  •'  was 
o{  lamp  as  '  [a  kind  of  brocaded  silk],  "  cherry 
colour  and  silver,  and  trimmed  with  sable." 

En  viritd  Mademoiselle  must  have  been  ravis- 
sante,  and  we  should  have  been  the  first  to  tell 
her  so,  certain  that  our  remarks  would  have 
been  properly  appreciated.  Let  us  add  that  she 
completely  vanquished  the  impetuous  Achilles, 
who  made  her  a  proposal  in  form  after  one  of 
the  rehearsals.  She  was  then  eleven,  but  she 
.thoroughly  appreciated  the  obligation  she  had 
conferred  upon  society  at  that  important  act  of 
her  nativity.  "  That  a  doctor's  son,  a  man  who 
was  not  a  gentleman,  should  have  had  the  au- 
dacity to  speak  of  love  to  Madame  la  Com- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  123 

tesse  !  "  Atrocious  !  "  The  young  man  was  " 
—  we  rejoice  to  record  it  —  ''reprimanded  by 
his  father  as  he  deserved  to  be." 

Meanwhile  the  rehearsals  went  on  briskly, 
and  the  company  grew  more  and  more  used  to 
the  boards.  At  the  end  of  three  months  they 
were  playing  Voltaire's  Zaire,  in  which  Ma- 
dame de  Lancy  took  the  part  of  the  heroine  ; 
then  the  Folies  Amoureuses  of  Regnard,  in 
which  she  played  Agatha.  The  so-called  re- 
hearsals were,  in  fact,  performances,  as  numbers 
of  spectators  came  from  Bourbon-Lancy  and 
Moulins,  and  "  these  eternal  files,"'  she  re- 
marks, "  must  have  cost  a  good  deal  of 
money." 

Here  is  a  comical  incident  at  one  of  them  :  — 
"  There  was  a  part  of  the  prologue  that  I 
liked  immensely,  and  certainly  the  idea  was  a 
novel  one.  As  I  have  said,  I  played  Cupid, 
and  a  little  boy  from  the  village  represented 
Pleasure.  I  had  to  sing  some  verses  which 
were  supposed  to  be  addressed  to  my  father, 
and  which  ended  with  these  words :  — 

'  Au  Plaisir  farrache  Us  aUes 
Pour  U  mieux  fixer  pris  de  votis' 

and  as  I  concluded  I  had  to  seize  the  little 
Pleasure  and  pluck  away  his  wings.  But  it 
happened  one   day  at  a  grand  dress-rehearsal, 


124  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

that  the  wings,  being  too  firmly  fixed,  resisted 
all  my  efforts.  Vainly  I  shook  Pleasure  :  his 
wings  had  grown  to  his  shoulders.  I  became 
excited  and  threw  him  down,  crying  piteously  ; 
I  never  let  him  go,  all  tumbled  though  he  was, 
and  finally,  to  my  lasting  honour,  tore  away  the 
wings  of  the  now  disconsolate  Pleasure,  who 
roared  with  vexation." 

Her  Cupid's  costume  was  considered  to  be  so 
becoming  that  she  wore  nothing  else,  and  took 
her  walks  abroad  with  all  the  paraphernalia, 
quiver  at  back  and  bow  in  hand.  All  her 
dresses  were  made  to  pattern.  She  had  a  week- 
day Cupid's  dress  and  a  Sunday  Cupid's  dress. 
The  only  difference  was  that  the  celestial  at- 
tributes were  removed,  and  the  costume  slightly 
monasticised  by  a  covering  cloak,  when  she 
went  to  church.  "  Friendship,"  says  the  pretty 
French  proverb  which  Byron  has  made  the  bur- 
den of  a  song,  "  is  Love  without  his  wings." 
So  the  little  Countess  de  Lancy  went  week- 
days en  Amour  and  Sundays  en  AmitU.  If  we 
might  be  permitted  to  push  the  fancy  further, 
we  should  say  that  this  was  very  much  her  po- 
sition throughout  life.  The  world  certainly  had 
her  love  and  the  best  of  her  time,  but  we  ques- 
tion very  much  whether  her  vaunted  attachment 
to  the  Church  was  anything  more  than  a  deco- 


Madame  de  Genii's.  125 

rous  acquaintanceship,  or  species  of  unwinged 
affection. 

She  kept  her  Cupid's  dress  and  name  for  some 
nine  months.  M.  de  St.  Aubin,  possibly  pre- 
ferring the  attractions  of  Paris  to  the  country 
theatricals  which  awaited  him,  had  been  a  year 
and  a-half  away,  and  still  the  fetes  are  continued. 
Her  mother,  wishing  to  add  dancing  to  music 
and  tragedy,  invited  a  danseuse  from  Autun, 
who  taught  her  to  dance  a  minuet  and  an  enlriie. 
.But  Mademoiselle  Mion's  saltatory  exertions 
required  so  much  succour  from  stimulants  that 
she  was  discharged,  and  succeeded  by  a  pro- 
fessor of  fifty,  who  was  a  fencing-master  as 
well.  To  the  entrde  he  added  a  saraband,  and 
finally  taught  her  to  fence,  which  greatly  de- 
lighted her.  She  succeeded  so  well  that  her 
mother  decided  to  let  her  play  Darviane  in  the 
Mdlanide  of  La  Chaussee,  a  part  in  which  she 
had  to  draw  sword  and  defend  herself.  After 
this  she  wore  a  "  charming  male  costume  "  until 
she  left  Burgundy,  a  circumstance  which,  never- 
theless, did  not  prevent  her  from  habitually 
assisting  at  the  procession  of  the  Fete  Dieu 
attired  as  an  angel. 

No  one,  she  says,  confessor  included,  was 
ever  —  to  her  knowledge  at  least  —  at  all  scan- 
dalised   by  this    extraordinary  equipment    and 


126  Four  Frenchwomen. 

education.  "  However,  I  gained  in  this  way 
—  that  my  feet  were  better  turned,  and  I  walked 
far  better  than  most  women,  while  I  was  cer- 
tainly more  active  than  any  I  have  known.  I 
led  a  charming  life  :  in  the  morning  I  played  a 
little  on  the  harpsichord  and  sang ;  then  I  learnt 
my  parts,  and  then  I  took  my  dancing  lesson  and 
fenced  ;  after  this  I  read  until  dinner-time  with 
Mademoiselle  de  Mars." 


III. 


By  this  time  the  dilapidated  Chateau  St.  Au- 
bin  threatened  to  fall  about  their  ears,  and  the 
mother  and  daughter  removed  to  Bourbon- 
Lancy,  where  M.  de  St.  Aubin  at  length  joined 
them  in  1757,  when  the  fHes  were  of  course 
continued.  It  is  now  his  turn  to  be  left  be- 
hind, and  the  mother  and  daughter  spend  a  con- 
siderable time  at  Paris  with  Madame  de  St. 
Aubin's  sister,  Madame  de  Belleveau.  Then 
M.  de  St.  Aubin,  who,  in  all  probability,  had 
been  burning  the  other  end  of  the  candle  in  the 
capital,  is  discovered  to  be  ruined  —  a  circum- 
stance which  reduces  their  income  to  about  fifty 
pounds  a  year,  and  causes  a  quarrel  between  the 
sisters.     Mademoiselle  de  Mars  is  naturally  dis- 


Madame  Je  Genlis.  127 

pensed  with.  M.  de  St.  Aubin,  after  some  little 
stay  in  Burgundy,  goes  to  St.  Domingo  to  re- 
trieve his  fortune,  and  his  wife  and  daughter 
find  a  temporary  asylum  at  Passy  in  the  house 
of  a  fashionable  Maecenas  and  farmer-general, 
M.  de  la  Popeliniere. 

Here  our  heroine's  theatrical  and  musical  at- 
tainments obtained  her  no  small  credit.  She 
took  soubretles'  and  ingdnues'  parts  in  the  pieces 
of  M.  de  la  Popeliniere,  and  in  one  of  these 
danced  a  dance  which,  she  complacently  re- 
marks, had  the  greatest  success.  Here,  too, 
she  began  to  acquire,  under  Gaiffre,  otherwise 
"  King  David,"  that  art  of  harp-playing  in  which 
she  afterwards  excelled.  Our  host  was  enchanted 
with  our  little  talents,  and  would  frequently  ex- 
claim with  a  sigh,  "  What  a  pity  it  is  that  she  is 
only  thirteen !  "  which  was  fully  understood  and 
appreciated.  And,  indeed,  if  we  had  been  a 
little  older  he  should  not  have  sighed  in  vain, 
although  he  was  over  sixty-five.  Every  con- 
sideration should  fall  before  our  respect  for 
age.  In  any  other  case  we  can  be  firm,  as  for 
example  when  we  reject  a  M.  de  Monville  — 
who,  by  our  own  showing,  had  every  good  qual- 
ity, except  quality — upon  very  much  the  same 
grounds  as  the  impetuous  Achilles.  She  has 
chronicled  one  of  her  habits  while  at  Passy,  to 


128  Four  Frenchwomen. 

which,  doubtless,  she  owed  much  of  that  easy 
fluency  which  no  one  has  ever  attempted  to  deny 
to  her.  In  her  walks  with  Mademoiselle  Vic- 
toire,  her  mothers  femme-de-chambre,  who  took, 
charge  of  her,  vice  Mademoiselle  de  Mars  dis- 
pensed with,  she  was  accustomed  to  employ 
herself  in  the  following  manner  :  — While  Ma- 
demoiselle Victoire  sat  down  and  knitted,  the 
little  lady  marched  backwards  and  forwards  be- 
fore her,  rehearsing  imaginary  dialogues  and 
building  innumerable  castles  in  the  air. 

"  In  these  first  dialogues,  I  always  assumed 
that  Mademoiselle  de  Mars  had  come  to  see  me 
secretly.  I  related  to  her  all  that  happened  to 
me,  all  that  I  thought  :  /  made  her  speak  per- 
feclly  in  character.  She  gave  me  very  good 
advice  for  the  present  and  for  the  future,  and 
recounted  to  me  also,  on  her  part,  all  kinds  of 
things,  which  /  invented  with  marvellous  faciliiy. 
I  grew  so  fond  of  these  imaginary  conversations 
that  I  doubt  whether  the  reality  would  have  had 
a  greater  charm  for  me,  and  I  was  sadly  discon- 
certed when  Mademoiselle  Victoire  put  an  end 
to  them  by  carrying  me  away,  protesting  to  my 
imaginary  friend  that  I  should  return  on  the 
following  day  at  the  same  hour." 

Madame  du  Deffand,  philosophising  one  day 
from  her  "  tub,"  divided  the  world  into  three 


Madame  de  Genlis.  129 

classes  —  les  trompeun,  les  trompds,  el  les  trom- 
pettes.  Madame  de  Lancy  —  witness  those  ital- 
icised sentences,  witness  her  memoirs  passim  — 
belonged,  undoubtedly,  to  the  last  of  these. 
But  she  has  been  criticised  as  if  vanity  was  a 
rarity,  or  self-laudation  an  uncommon  and  a 
monstrous  feature  of  this  kind  of  composition. 
It  is  but  fair,  however,  to  remember  that  in  this 
case  the  education  of  the  writer  had  peculiarly 
qualified  her  for  the  style,  that  her  talents  had 
hit  the  taste  of  the  time,  and  gained  her  ex- 
travagant applause,  and  that,  at  least,  she  seems 
to  have  been  thoroughly  aware  of  her  fault. 

"Since  I  had  lost  Mademoiselle  de  Mars" 
[who,  by  the  way,  appears  to  have  been  rather 
more  sensible  than  those  about  her],  "  vanity  had 
become  the  chief  motive  of  all  my  actions.  My 
heart  and  my  reasoning  powers  were  so  little  cul- 
tivated, I  was  praised  so  extravagantly  for  tri- 
fles, that  I  had  acquired  a  puerile  amour  propre 
which  made  me  attach  an  absurd  importance 
to  all  the  merely  ornamental  talents  which  could 
give  a  certain  celebrity." 

Quitting  Passy,  the  mother  and  daughter  re- 
turned to  Paris  lodgings,  where  the  music  and 
singing  made  great  progress.  At  this  time,  she 
says,  she  practised  from  eight  to  ten  hours  a  day. 
The  famous  Philidor  gives  her  lessons,  and  she 
9 


I30  Four  Frenchwomen. 

learns  to  use  several  instruments,  among  others 
that  one  which  the  late  M.  Victor  Hugo  per- 
sisted in  calling  the  "  bugpipe."  But  the  harp 
is  preferred  before  all ;  indeed,  she  takes  credit 
for  having  made  the  instrument  fashionable  — 
and  "  King  David's  fortune." 

The  summer  of  1761  was  spent  in  another 
country  house,  where  they  make  the  acquaint- 
ance of  that  Madame  d'Esparb^s  of  the  little 
hands  whose  privilege  it  was  to  peel  cherries  for 
Louis  XV.,  a  distinction  which  was  so  highly 
valued  that  the  lady  is  said  to  have  endured 
frequent  bleeding  in  order  to  maintain  their 
"  dazzling  whiteness."  After  this  Madame  de 
St.  Aubin  took  a  small  house  in  the  Rue 
d'Aguesseau,  where,  among  other  visitors,  come 
the  pastellist  Latour,  the  musician  and  chess- 
player, Philidor,  and  Honavre,  the  pianist. 
They  saw  a  great  deal  of  good  society,  but 
her  instinctive  good  taste,  she  tells  us,  warned 
her  that  her  mother  was  far  too  prodigal  of  her 
daughter's  singing  and  playing. 

Meanwhile  M.  de  St.  Aubin,  returning  from 
St.  Domingo,  it  is  to  be  presumed  with  his 
fortune  retrieved,  was  taken  by  the  English  and 
imprisoned  at  Launceston.  At  Launceston  he 
formed  the  acquaintance  of  a  brother  in  mis- 
fortune, the  Count  Brulart  de  Genlis,  an  officer 


Madame  de  Geulis.  131 

in  the  navy,  who  not  only  procured  his  friend's 
release  after  he  had  been  himself  set  free,  but 
upon  his  descriptions  and  the  judicious  exhibi- 
tion of  a  portrait,  fell  in  love  with  Madame  de 
Lancy.  Her  father  died  shortly  after  his  return 
to  France  of  a  disorder  aggravated  by  pecuniary 
difficulties.  His  widow  found  a  temporary  re- 
fuge in  the  Convent  of  the  Fillcs  da  Pricieux 
Sang.  Here  our  heroine  received  an  offer  of 
marriage  from  a  friend  of  her  father  —  the  Baron 
d'Andlau,  who  conceived  the  original  idea  of 
forwarding  his  bulky  pedigree  by  his  valet,  to 
assist  her  in  the  consideration  of  the  matter, 
but  without  success.  Probably  the  fact  that 
M.  de  Genlis's  uncle  was  Minister  for  Foreign 
Affairs,  which  made  him  a  more  eligible  suitor, 
had  something  to  do  with  it.  We  all  know  that 
Miss  Rebecca  Sharpe  —  who  in  many  things  is 
not  unlike  Madame  de  Lancy  —  would  have 
been  barely  courteous  to  Jos.  Sedley  if  she  hap- 
pened to  hope  that  Captain  Rawdon  Crawley 
would  prance  up  on  his  black  charger  from  the 
Knightsbridge  Barracks.  The  Baron,  however, 
determined  to  be  of  the  family,  and  resigning  the 
filia  pulchrior.  laid  siege  to  the  pulchra  mater, 
whom  he  married  about  eighteen  months  after. 

From  the  Pricieux  Sang  they  moved  to  Ma- 
dame du  Deffand's  convent,  St.  Joseph.  Madame 


132  Four  Frenchwomen. 

de  Lancy's  dates  and  age  depend  very  often  upon 
her  momentary  taste  and  fancy  ;  but  it  was  ap- 
parently during  her  stay  here,  or  in  November, 
1763,  when  she  was  seventeen,  she  says,  that, 
much  to  the  disgust  of  his  very  arbitrary  guar- 
dian, M.  de  Genlis  married  her.  With  the 
exception  of  his  brother,  M.  le  Marquis  de 
Genlis,  most  of  her  husband's  relatives  scouted 
the  pair,  and  after  a  week  or  two  M.  de  Genlis 
carried  her  to  the  convent  of  Origny.  Here 
she  remained  until  April,  1764,  while  her  hus- 
band was  in  garrison  at  Nancy,  for  he  was  now 
a  colonel  of  grenadiers,  and  she  seems  to  have 
passed  the  time  very  pleasantly.  We  have  here- 
tofore seen  her  as  Cupid  ;  she  now  appears  as 
Puck,  to  say  nothing  of  a  part  seldom  attempted 
by  ladies :  — 

"  I  cried  a  good  deal  at  losing  M.  de  Genlis  " 
[she  had  a  'gift  of  tears '  quite  equal  to  Loyola's], 
"and  afterwards  amused  myself  immensely  at 
Origny.  ...  I  had  a  pretty  room  inside  the  con- 
ven.t  with  my  maid,  and  I  had  a  servant  who 
lodged  with  theabbess's  people  in  the  outer  build- 
ing. ...  I  enjoyed  myself,  and  they  liked  me  ; 
I  often  played  my  harp  to  Madame  I'Abbesse  ; 
I  sang  motets  in  the  organ-gallery  of  the  church, 
and  played  tricks  upon  the  nuns.  I  scoured  the 
corridors  at  night-time  —  that  is  to  say,  at  mid- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  133 

night  —  attired  usually  ^  en  diable,^  with  horns 
and  a  blackened  face,  and  in  this  guise  I  woke  up 
the  younger  nuns,  whilst  I  crept  softly  into  the 
cells  of  the  older  ones,  whom  I  knew  to  be 
thoroughly  deaf,  and  rouged  and  patched  them 
carefully  without  disturbing  their  slumbers. 
They  got  up  every  night  to  go  to  the  choir, 
and  one  may  fancy  their  surprise  when,  having 
dressed  hastily  without  glasses,  they  met  in  the 
church  and  found  themselves  thus  travestied. 
I  went  freely  into  the  cells,  for  the  nuns  are  for- 
bidden to  lock  themselves  in,  and  are  obliged  to 
leave  their  keys  in  the  doors  both  day  and  night. 
During  the  whole  of  the  Carnival  I  gave  balls 
twice  a  week  in  my  room  with  the  permission 
of  the  abbess.  They  allowed  me  to  have  in  the 
village  fiddler,  who  was  sixty  years  of  age  and 
blind  of  one  eye.  He  piqued  himself  upon 
knowing  all  the  steps  and  figures,  and  I  re- 
member that  he  called  the  chassis,  flanquis. 
My  company  was  composed  of  nuns  and  pen- 
sionnaires :  the  former  acted  as  men,  the  latter 
were  the  ladies.  My  refreshments  consisted  of 
cider  and  excellent  pastry,  which  was  made  in 
the  convent.  I  have  been  to  many  grand  balls 
since,  but  I  question  whether  I  ever  danced  at 
any  more  heartily  or  with  greater  gaiety." 
Yet,  notwithstanding  all  these  escapades,  she 


134  Po^^  Frenchwomen. 

still  found  time  to  acquire  various  kinds  of  in- 
formation. She  learned  to  bring  up  fowls,  to 
make  pastry  and  side-dishes.  "  My  guitar,  my 
harp,  and  my  pen  employed  me  a  great  part  of 
the  day,  and  I  devoted  at  least  two  hours  every 
morning  to  reading.  I  was  very  ignorant  of 
books,  for  up  to  that  period  all  my  time  had 
been  devoted  to  music."  At  Origny,  too,  she 
systematically  perfects  her  fictitious  dialogues  ; 
at  Origny,  again,  she  begins  to  make  copious 
extracts  from  all  she  reads,  and  to  scribble 
verses  —  among  other  things  an  epistle  upon  the 
"  Tranquillity  of  the  Cloister." 

In  the  spring  of  1764  M.  de  Genlis  fetched 
away  his  affectionate  wife,  who  accompanied 
him  very  unwillingly  to  his  brother's  .seat  at 
Genlis.  M.  le  Marquis  de  Genlis  was  at  this 
time  *'  under  the  ban."  His  arbitrary  guardian, 
M.  de  Puisieux,  had  not  only  already  shut  him 
up  for  five  years  in  the  Castle  of  Saumur  for  his 
incorrigible  gaming,  but  he  had  for  the  last  two 
been  living  in  a  kind  of  exile  at  his  estate  of 
Genlis,  under  pain  of  making  a  good  marriage. 
At  the  present  moment  he  was  absent  at  Paris, 
we  presume  upon  what  Mr.  Weller  the  elder 
calls  "  patrole." 

At  Genlis  the  newly-married  pair  appear  to 
have  lived  very  happily  ;  and  here,  aided  by  the 


Madame  de  Gen  lis.  135 

counsels  of  a  second-rate  man  of  letters,  M.  de 
Sauvigny,  Madame  de  Genlis  pursued  her  mul- 
tifarious studies  with  great  energy  :  — 

"  Every  day,  when  we  came  in  from  walking, 
we"  [M.  de  Genlis,  M.  de  Sauvigny,  and  her- 
self] "  read  aloud  for  an  hour.  In  a  space  of 
four  months  we  thus  got  through  the  '  Lettres 
Provinciales,"  the  letters  of  Madame  de  Sevigne, 
and  the  plays  of  Corneille,  Besides  this  I  read 
in  my  room,  and  time  passed  very  pleasantly 
and  quickly.  A  surgeon  of  La  F^re,  called  M. 
Milet,  used  to  come  to  Genlis  every  week  ;  with 
him  I  went  over  my  old  anatomical  studies,  and, 
moreover,  learned  to  bleed,  an  accomplishment 
which  I  have  since  perfected  under  the  learned 
Chamousset.  I  learned  also  to  dress  wounds. 
In  fact,  I  lost  no  opportunity,"  etc. 

Then  she  learns  riding  under  the  auspices  of 
a  soldier  of  fortune  in  the  neighbourhood,  and 
is  almost  lost  in  seeking  adventurously  for  un- 
discovered countries. 

"  But  this  new  passion  did  not  make  me 
neglect  either  my  music  or  my  studies  ;  M.  de 
Sauvigny  superintended  my  reading,  and  I  made 
extracts.  I  had  discovered  in  the  pantry  a  large 
folio  book,  intended  for  the  kitchen  accounts  ;  I 
had  taken  possession  of  it,  and  I  wrote  down  in 
it  a  detailed  journal  of  my  doings  and  reflections, 


136  Four  Frenchwomen. 

intending  to  give  it  to  my  mother  when  com- 
pleted ;  I  wrote  every  day  a  few  lines,  some- 
times whole  pages.  Neglecting  no  branch  of 
learning,  I  endeavoured  to  gain  some  insight 
into  field-labour  and  gardening.  I  went  to  see 
the  cider  made.  I  went  to  watch  all  the  work- 
men In  the  village  at  work,  —  the  carpenter,  the 
weaver,  the  basket-maker,  etc.  I  learned  to 
play  at  billiards  and  several  games  of  cards,  as 
piquet,  reversis,  etc.  M.  de  Genlis  drew  figures 
and  landscapes  capitally "  \_parfailement  is  her 
word]  "  in  pen  and  ink  ;  I  commenced  drawing 
and  flower-painting." 

M.  le  Marquis  de  Genlis  having  managed  to 
find  his  heiress,  is  married  to  her,  and  every- 
thing in  consequence  goes  merry  as  his  marriage- 
bell.  In  September,  176';,  Madame  de  Genlis 
becomes  a  mother,  after  which  she  is  visited  by 
her  relations,  who  thereupon  carry  her  to  court. 
She  has  left  a  most  laughable  description  of  the 
terrors  of  her  toilet,  over  which  important  busi- 
ness Madame  de  Puisieux  and  her  daughter,  the 
Mar^chale  d'^str^e,  wrangle  most  unbecomingly. 
Her  hair  is  thrice  dressed  before  her  judges  de- 
cide how  it  shall  be  finally  worn.  They  rouge 
and  powder  her  most  lavishly.  Then  they  insist 
upon  squeezing  her  into  her  "  dress  body,"  in 
order  that   she   may    grow  accustomed  to   it, 


Madame  de  Genlis.  137 

lacing  her  so  tightly  that  she  can  barely  endure 
the  pressure.  An  angry  and  prolonged  dispute 
afterwards  arises  upon  the  question  of  the  ruff, 
during  which  time  the  unfortunate  candidate  for 
court  honours  is  obliged  to  stand,  and  when  the 
debate  is  over,  she  is  so  worn  out  that  she  can 
hardly  walk  in  to  dinner.  The  ruff  is  taken  off 
and  replaced  at  least  four  times,  and  the  matter 
is  at  last  decided  by  the  overwhelming  influence 
of  the  Marechale's  waiting-maids.  After  the 
farce  of  dinner  (for  she  is  too  tightly  laced  to 
eat  anything),  during  the  whole  of  which  the 
discussion  is  carried  on  with  great  acrimony, 
she  is  requested  to  get  into  her  hoop  and  train, 
in  order  to  rehearse  the  curtsey  which  Gardel, 
the  ballet-master  of  the  opera,  has  been  occu- 
pied in  teaching  her.  This  is  a  partial  success, 
although  Madame  de  Puisieux  forbids  her  to 
slide  back  her  foot  in  order  to  disengage  her 
train,  a  course  which  leaves  her  no  resource  but 
to  fall  upon  her  face,  in  order  to  avoid  the  other 
extreme  of  being  "  theatrical."  At  last,  when 
they  start,  she  manages  secretly  to  remove  a 
little  of  the  obnoxious  colour  ;  but  Madame  de 
Puisieux  immediately  pulls  out  a  rouge-box,  and 
plasters  her  more  thickly  than  before.  How- 
ever, everything  goes  off  well,  and  she  manages 
to  admire  the  kinj;. 


138  Four  Frenchwomen. 

In  1766  she  again  has  a  daughter,  after  which 
her  aunt,  the  Madame  de  Montesson  who  mar- 
ried the  Duke  of  Orleans  in  1773,  takes  her  to 
rile  Adam,  the  famous  country  house  of  the 
Prince  de  Conti,  which  for  a  jeune  personne 
was  the  highest  of  honours.  Thence  they  fare 
to  Villers-Cotterets,  the  seat  of  the  Duke  of 
Orleans,  and  afterwards  to  Madame  de  Pui- 
sieux's,  at  Sillery,  where  the  young  countess, 
returning  to  that  character  of  inginue  which  she 
had  played  so  successfully  at  Passy,  constructs 
and  acts  out  a  clever  little  drawing-room  scene 
which  completely  wins  over  the  elder  lady,  who 
had  hitherto  been  anything  but  amiable. 

To  sum  up.  The  "  royal  blue  eyes "  of 
majesty  have  shone  upon  her,  and  she  is  marked 
with  the  Versailles  sign-manual.  She  has  ap- 
peared at  rile  Adam,  and  propitiated  her  unpro- 
pitious  relatives.  She  may  now  be  said  to  have 
made  her  dibut, 

IV. 

Restless  and  frivolous,  ennuyis  and  hlasis, 
asking  incessantly,  like  her  friend  M.  Dam6- 
zague,  ^^  Qae  f^rons-nous  demain  matin)"  the 
fine  gentlemen  and  ladies  of  1765  gave  a  warm 
welcome  to  the  new  debutante  in  good  society. 


Madame  de  Genii's.  139 

She  was  young  and  handsome,  a  capital  actress 
and  a  better  musician  ;  she  had  in  reality,  or 
affected  to  have,  a  childish  gaiety  and  an  insati- 
able appetite  for  freak  which  were  quite  in  keep- 
ing with  the  reigning  fashion,  whilst  her  uneasy 
craving  for  notoriety  occupied  her  unceasingly 
in  catering  for  the  public  amusement.  The 
record  of  the  next  dozen  years  of  her  life  is 
trifling  enough.  It  is  an  endless  chronicle  of 
tricks  and  mystifications,  of  mummeries  and  tra- 
vesties ;  an  interlude  which  is  all  the  play  — 
or,  better,  a  comi die-ballet  after  the  fashion 
of  the  Bourgeois  Genlilhomme  or  the  Malade 
Imaginaire.  Now,  like  a  modern  Poppaea,  we 
see  her  riding  off  on  a  donkey,  in  company  with 
the  Marquise  de  Genlis,  both  disguised  as  peas- 
ants, to  buy  up  all  the  milk  in  the  vicinity,  in 
order  to  have  a  bath  d.  la  Romaine ;  now  se- 
cretly learning  the  dulcimer  in  a  garret  at  Sil- 
lery,  with  the  view  of  surprising  Madame  de 
Puisieux  in  the  character  of  a  jeune  Alsacienne, 
whose  costume,  it  is  needless  to  say,  she  wears 
for  a  fortnight  afterwards.  Acting  always  —  in 
Norman  country  houses  to  audiences  of  five  hun- 
dred, at  rile  Adam,  at  Villers-Cotterets,  at  Sil- 
lery,  at  Vaudreuil  —  and  with  a  success  that 
draws  tears  of  vexation  from  her  less-gifted  sis- 
ters.    At  one  place  they  will  barely  relinquish 


140  Four  Frenchwomen. 

her  at  bed-time,  her  bon-mots  are  cited,  and  her 
merits  rehearsed  by  common  consent.  She  ap- 
pears, too,  to  have  "been  sufficiently  satisfied 
with  the  life  she  led  —  at  all  events,  before  she 
entered  the  Palais  Royal.  "  This  was  styled 
a  frivolous  kind  of  existence,"  says  she,  speak- 
ing of  M.  d'Albaret,  fribble  and  virtuoso;  "as 
for  me,  I  think  it  far  happier  and  more  amiable 
than  a  life  devoted  to  the  acquisition  of  wealth 
or  the  intrigues  of  ambition."  Moreover,  her 
intention  in  the  preservation  of  these  things  is 
purely  utilitarian.  She  is  good  enough,  in  fact, 
to  furnish  us  with  the  moral  —  d  sa  manUre. 
A  propos  of  the  fore-mentioned  Alsacian  dis- 
guise, she  writes  —  "  It  is  not  without  design 
that  I  enter  into  these  minor  details  ;  they  will 
not  be  wholly  useless  to  young  ladies  who  may 
hereafter  peruse  this  work.  I  wish  to  persuade 
them  that  youth  is  never  happy  unless  it  is  ami- 
able—  that  is  to  say,  docile,  modest,  and  at- 
tentive —  and  that  the  true  role  "  [always  a  rdle, 
be  it  observed  !  ]  "  of  a  jeune  personne  is  to 
please  in  her  family,  and  to  bring  into  it  gaiety, 
amusement,  and  joy."  The  sentiments  are  ir- 
reproachable. Let  us  trust  that  the  jeune  per- 
sonne will  not  mistake  the  wearing  of  becoming 
fancy-dresses,  the  frequent  exhibition  of  her 
"  little  talents,"  and  the  continual  gratification 


Madame  de  Genlis.  141 

of  her  vanity  and  love  of  praise,  as  the  primary 
and  principal  means  to  the  end  she  has  in 
view. 

Perhaps  the  best  idea  of  her  mode  of  life  at 
this  time  may  be  gained  by  the  recital  of  her 
visit  to  Vaudreuil,  in  Normandy,  the  seat  of  the 
President  Portal.  Here,  responding  to  M. 
Dam^zague's  eternal  "  Qug  fdrons-nous  demain 
matin ) "  we  find  her  organising  and  drilling  a 
company  of  amateurs  ;  acting  a  piece  by  herself 
in  order  to  teach  them  ;  writing  a  drama  in  two 
days  based  upon  a  local  tradition  (with  a  "charm- 
ing role  "  for  herself  of  a  wigged  and  bearded 
old  man)  ;  re-casting  in  six  more  Favart's  three- 
act  comedy  of  "  Les  Trois  Sultanes,''''  with  another 
part  for  herself  in  which  she  sings,  and  dances, 
and  plays  on  the  harp,  the  harpsichord,  the  bag- 
pipe, the  guitar,  the  dulcimer,  and  the  hurdy- 
gurdy.  Nor  must  it  be  supposed  that  she  could 
do  no  more.  "  I  only  wanted  my  pardessus  de 
viole,'"'  she  writes,  "  but  I  had  not  used  it  for 
more  than  three  years,  and  my  mandolin  would 
have  had  but  a  poor  success  after  my  guitar, 
which  I  played  infinitely  better."  Eight  instru- 
ments in  all  —  nine,  in  point  of  fact,  if  we 
add  another  upon  which  her  proficiency  is  re- 
markable, but  which  politeness  forbids  us  again 
to  particularise. 


142  Four  Frenclrwomen. 

From  Vaudreuil  they  made  an  excursion  to 
Dieppe  to  visit  the  ocean,  which  as  yet  she  had 
not  seen.  In  the  face  of  Nature,  she  takes  care 
to  tell  us,  she  was  so  profoundly  impressed  that 
her  companions  complained  of  her  dullness ; 
nor  does  she  omit  to  state  that  Neptune  re- 
ceived her  very  discourteously.  When  they 
returned  to  Vaudreuil  they  find  that  the  presi- 
dent had  received  information  that  certain  ad- 
miring corsairs,  who  had  witnessed  the  marine 
exploits  of  Madame  la  Comtesse  and  Madame 
de  M^rode,  her  companion,  had  determined,  in 
consequence,  to  carry  them  off  to  the  Grand 
Seigneur's  seraglio.  The  only  way  in  which 
they  can  preserve  themselves  from  so  eminent 
and  imminent  a  fate  is  to  be  received  as  -Vestals 
in  the  temple  of  the  Peiil  bois — a  species  of  sanc- 
tuary in  the  president's  private  garden,  which  was 
reserved  for  the  more  select  and  sacred  of  his 
entertainments  en  petit  comity.  To  this  temple 
they  were  conducted  by  the  nephew  of  their 
host,  the  Count  de  Caraman,  who  left  them  al- 
most immediately.  Here  they  found  the  High 
Priestess  (Madame  de  Puisieux)  and  the  High 
Priest  (M.  de  Portal)  waiting  to  receive  them. 
The  temple  was  decked  ftrds-orndj  with  garlands, 
and  the  ladies  of  the  company  made  up  its  chaste 
sisterhood.    When,  with  appropriate  verses,  they 


Madame  de  Genii's.  143 

had  been  admitted,  and  the  evening  shades  were 
closing  in,  a  terrible  noise  of  Turkish  music  is 
heard  approaching ;  it  is  the  Grand  Seigneur 
himself  coming  in  person  to  besiege  the  temple. 
The  Pontifex  Maximus  resents  this  infringement, 
and  refuses  to  sanction  the  entry  of  the  Infidels. 
Thereupon  some  three  hundred  Turks  leap  the 
walls  (this  is  exquisite  fooling  !)  and  carry  off 
the  Vestals  willy-nilly.  Madame  la  Comtesse 
being  slightly  frightened  and  out  of  temper, 
seems  to  have  behaved  with  an  intractable  and 
"  savage  virtue  "  that  would  have  done  credit  to 
a  better  cause,  and  which  was  certainly  quite  an 
unexpected  surprise  to  her  exalted  lover  (M.  de 
Caraman),  who  was  glittering  with  gold  and 
precious  stones,  and  who  looked,  she  records, 
uncommonly  ill  in  his  turban.  She  absolutely 
refused  to  be  abducted,  and  this  so  rudely,  that 
he  was  greatly  hurt.  Laying  hold  of  the  lady, 
he  is  pinched  and  scratched  and  kicked  about 
the  legs  (she  says  so)  until  the  maltreated  gen- 
tleman at  last  loses  his  temper,  and  carries  her 
off  in  a  fury.  She  is  placed  in  a  gorgeous  pal- 
anquin, and  followed  on  foot  by  the  irate  Sultan, 
limping,  possibly,  and  reproaching  her  bitterly. 
In  the  palanquin,  however,  soothed  by  the  splen- 
dour and  the  tribute  to  her  talents,  she  recovers 
her  equanimity,  and  manages  to  mollify  his  of- 


144  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

fended  Magnificence.  The  party  are  carried 
through  the  illuminated  gardens  to  a  grandly- 
decorated  ball-room  at  the  end  of  the  park. 
Here  the  delighted  Oriental  declares  Madame 
la  Comtesse  to  be  his  favourite  Sultana ;  they 
dance  all  night,  and,  plaudite  gcntes,  the  little 
play  is  over,  and  the  drop  falls  to  the  entire  sat- 
isfaction of  every  one  concerned. 

Among  other  things  the  idlers  of  1766  were 
indebted  to  her  for  an  ingenious  novelty  which 
she  contrived  for  the  balls  of  Madame  de  Crenay 
—  the  Quadrille  des  Proverbes. 

"  Each  couple,  in  the  preliminary  two-and- 
two  procession  which  always  preceded  the  per- 
formance, represented  a  proverb,  and  every  one 
had  chosen  a  motto.  We  had  unanimously  given 
Madame  de  Lauzun  "  [Amelie  de  Boufflers, 
afterwards  guillotined],  "  ^ Bonne  renommde  vaut 
mieux  que  ceinture  dorde.'  She  was  dressed  with 
the  greatest  simplicity,  and  wore  a  plain  grey 
girdle.  She  danced  with  M.  de  Belzunce.  The 
Duchess  de  Liancourt  danced  with  the  Count  de 
Boulainviliers,  who  wore  the  costume  of  an  old 
man  ;  their  motto  was  — '  A  vieux  chat  jeune 
souris.''  Madame  de  Marigni  danced  with  M.  de 
St.  Julien,  dressed  as  a  negro  :  she  passed  her 
handkerchief  from  time  to  time  over  his  face, 
which  signified,  '  A  laver  la  Uie  d'un  Maure  on 


Madame  de  Genii's.  145 

perd  sa  lesswe.''  I  don't  remember  the  proverb 
or  the  partner  of  my  sister-in-law,  the  Marquise 
de  Genlis.  My  own  dancer  was  the  Vicomte 
de  Laval,  magnificiently  attired  and  blazing  with 
jewellery.  I  was  dressed  as  a  peasant  girl.  Our 
proverb  was,  '  Contentement  passe  ricliesse.'  I 
appeared  gay  and  lively  ;  the  vicomte,  without 
any  acting,  looked  sad  and  ennuyd.  Thus  we 
made  ten.  I  had  written  the  air  —  it  was  very 
pretty  and  easily  danced  to.  Gardel  composed 
the  figures,  which,  in  accordance  with  my  idea, 
represented  another  proverb  —  '  Reculer  pour 
mieux  sauter."  He  made  of  this  the  prettiest 
and  liveliest  quadrille  that  I  have  ever  seen." 

It  had  a  great  success,  notwithstanding  the 
schemes  of  an  envious  coalition,  who  attempted 
to  disturb  the  performers  at  the  bal  de  VOpdra 
by  the  gambols  of  an  immense  cat  (a  little  Savo- 
yard in  disguise),  which  represented  an  adverse 
proverb  —  " //  ne  faut  pas  rdveiller  le  chat  qui 
dorl."  The  spectators,  however,  interfered  to 
protect  the  dancers. 

For  all  that  they  were  the  polished  exemplars 
whom  uncouth  Europeans  "  came  to  copy,  and 
vainly  strove  to  imitate  "  —  amongst  the  rest 
Mr.  Laurence  Sterne,  who  is  here  in  1762,  a 
fortnight  deep  in  dinners  and  suppers,  and  pro- 
testing that  in  savoir-vivre  the  place  exceeds  all 


146  Four  Frenchwomen. 

places  on  the  globe  — these  fine  ladies  and  gen- 
tlemen did  a  number  of  little  things,  doubtless 
in  the  "  pure  innocence  "  which  prompted  his 
Tristram  — 

"  That  would  have  made  Punctilio  stare  and  gasp." 

The  stately  old  Marechale  de  Luxembourg, 
oracle  of  pelUs-soupers  as  she  was,  must  not  for 
a  moment  be  mistaken  for  our  respectable  and 
never-too-much-to-be-honoured  Mrs.  Grundy. 
And  it  is  with  a  due  respect  for  the  awful  nominis 
umbra,  who  is  supposed  to  sit  in  eternal  judg- 
ment over  our  popular  propriety,  that  we  select 
the  following  from  amongst  the  lighter  examples 
in  this  way.  In  their  house  in  the  Rue  St.  Do- 
minique, M.  and  Madame  de  Genlis  .kept  an 
Italian  abbd,  who  read  Tasso  with  the  lady,  and 
was  in  addition  an  excellent  musician.  The 
poor  fellow  was  taken  ill  with  cholera,  and  died 
suddenly  one  evening  at  ten  o'clock.  Madame 
de  Genlis,  who  had  been  present  at  his  death- 
bed, was  so  struck  with  his  face,  that  she  de- 
clares she  will  not  sleep  under  the  same  roof 
with  the  corpse.  Forthwith  the  horses  are  put 
to  and  she  goes  off  to  sleep  at  Madame  de 
Balincour's,  where  the  gentleman  gave  up  his 
room  to  her.  At  half-past  twelve  she  retired  to 
rest.     In  a  few  minutes  she  fell  asleep,  but  was 


Madame  de  Genii's.  147 

presently  awakened  by  the  entrance  of  M.  de 
Balincour,  "  bon  vieillard  fort  spirituel,''  sing- 
ing a  little  song  in  a  merry  voice,  whilst  a  low 
whispering  betokened  that  there  were  five  or  six 
persons  in  the  room.  This  was  the  little  song 
to  the  air  of  "La  Baronne  :  "  — 

"  Dans  nion  alcSve 
Je  m'arracherai  les  chez'eux  ;  (bis) 
y<f  sens  que  je  deviendrai  chattve 
Si  je  n'obtiens  ce  queje  veux 

Dans  mon  alcdve" 

To  which  Madame  la  Comtesse,  nothing  dis- 
concerted, replied  after  a  moment's  silence  with 
the  following  impromptu  to  the  same  tune.  It 
so  happened,  fortunately  for  her,  that  the  bon 
vieillard  was  almost  bald  :  — 

"  Dans  votre  alc&ve 
Mcderez  Vardeiir  de  vosfeux ;  (bis) 
Car,  etijin,  pour  devenir  chauve 
Ilfatidrait  avoir  des  chez'eux 
Dans  votre  alcSve." 

The  answer,  of  course,  caused  a  general  laugh, 
and  had  "  the  most  brilliant  success."  Lights 
are  brought  in,  the  ladies  of  the  family  sit  upon 
the  bed,  the  gentlemen  make  a  circle  round  it, 
and  the  lively  company  talk  of  a  thousand  things 
until  three  in  the  morning,  when  M.  de  Balin- 
cour goes  out,  returning  almost  immediately 
dressed  as  a  pastry-cook,  bearing  an  immense 


148  Four  Frenchwomen. 

basket  of  sweetmeats,  preserves,  and  fruits. 
This  prolongs  the  entertainment  until  five,  for 
the  merry  gentleman  detains  them  more  than 
half-an-hour  in  proposing  all  kinds  of  amuse- 
ments, as  violins,  magic-lanterns,  and  puppet- 
shows,  and  when  at  last  Madame  la  Comtesse 
is  allowed  to  sleep,  she  is  awakened  again  at 
twelve  by  the  new  frolics  of  the  bon  vieillard. 
M.  de  Genlls,  appearing  to  claim  his  wife,  is 
detained  forcibly,  and  for  the  next  five  days 
there  is  nothing  but  acting  of  parts,  ballets, 
balls,  theatres,  concerts,  fairs,  songs,  and  games 

—  in  fact,  "  the  noisiest  five  days  that  she  ever 
passed." 

Up  to  the  year  1770,  they,  or  rather  she  — 
for  the  absences  of  her  husband  were,  frequent 

—  had  lived  principally  with  Madame  de  Pui- 
sieux.  In  1770,  after  some  months  spent  in  re- 
tirement with  this  lady,  who  was  mourning  the 
death  of  her  husband,  Madame  de  Genlis  left 
her  entirely  to  enter  the  Palais  Royal  as  lady-in- 
waiting  to  Madame  la  Duchesse  de  Chartres,  in 
whom  we  recognise  the  somewhat  sentimental 
and  romantic  Mademoiselle  de  Bourbon  who 
was  the  friend  of  Marie  de  Lamballe.  M.  de 
Genlis,  in  the  meantime,  had  obtained  an  ap- 
pointment as  captain  of  the  duke's  guards.  The 
duchess  seems  (at  first)  to  have  taken  a  great 


Madame  de  Genlis.  149 

liking  to  her  new  attendant,  who  obh'gingly 
teaches  her  to  spell,  a  kindly  office  which  she 
had  already  performed  for  Madame  la  Marquise 
de  Genlis.  Our  space  will  not  permit  us  to 
linger  over  her  portraits  of  the  notabilities  of  the 
Palais  Royal,  which  strove  with  the  Temple 
(the  palace  of  the  Prince  de  Conti)  for  the  first 
place  among  the  salons  of  Paris.  Whilst  hasten- 
ing to  the  next  important  epoch  in  her  life  (in 
1776),  we  may  note  that  she  had  already  visited 
Holland,  Italy,  Switzerland,  and  some  parts  of 
Germany.  To  England  she  had  not  yet  come. 
Her  experiences  of  Rousseau  and  Voltaire,  whom 
she  knew  and  visited  during  this  time,  will  be 
given  in  the  succeeding  section.  Just  one  more 
extract  and  we  have  done  with  the  frivolous  — 
it  were  juster,  perhaps,  to  say  the  most  frivolous 
—  portion  of  the  Memoirs.  This  little  incident 
of  the  Porcherons  is  a  last  example  of  the  morbid 
desire  for  excitement  which  led  the  great  world 
to  envy  even  the  coarse  sallies  and  "vigorous 
dancing  "  of  the  guinguettes  —  of  the  universal 
taste  for  travesties  and  disguises,  which  prompted 
even  rigorous  Madame  Roland  to  ride  off  on 
donkey-back  en  cuisinUre  —  with  arm  akimbo 
and  air  of  gaping  thickwittedness  —  after  her 
cousin  Trude.  For  the  better  appreciation  of 
the  performance  we  subjoin  a  list  of  the  — 


150  Four  Frenchwomen. 

©tamatijj  pcrjsonae. 

Madame  la  Comtesse  de  PorocKA. 

(A  Polish  lady  of  rank.) 

Madame  la  Comtesse  de  Genlis. 

(Lady-in-  Walling  lo  the  Duchess  of  Chartres.) 

Madame  la  Baronne  d'Andlati. 

{Mother  to  the  above  —  over  fifty.) 

M.  de  Maisonneuve. 
{Chamberlain  to  King  Stanislas  of  Poland.) 

M.  de  Genus. 

( Captain  of  Guards  to  the  Duke  of  Chartres^ 

M.   GiLLIER. 

( Ci-devant  Alajor  in  an  East  Indiatt  Regiment  — fifty- ) 

Scene  —  The  "  Great  Conqueror  "  of  the  Porcherons. 

The  Madame  de  Potocka  in  question  had  made 
the  acquaintance  of  Madame  de  Genlis  at  Aix- 
la-Chapelle,  and  had  been  "  doing  "  P^ris  under 
her  auspices.  As  yet  they  had  not  explored  the 
guinguettes — taverns  outside  the  barriers  —  tea- 
gardens,  in  fact,  where  tea  was  unknown,  and 
M.  de  Genlis  had  proposed  to  take  them  to  the 
most  noted  house  of  the  kind.  The  ladies  were 
to  go  as  cooks,  MM.  de  Maisonneuve  and 
Genlis  as  servants  in  livery. 

"  The  next  day,"  she  says,  "  I  was  supping 
at  the  Palais  Royal  with  Madame  de  Potocka. 
On  this  particular  evening  she  was  splendidly 
dressed  in  a  gold  robe,  and  wearing  an  enor- 
mous quantity  of  diamonds.     At  eleven  M.  de 


Madame  de  Genii's.  151 

Genlis  came  up  to  her  very  gravely,  and  reminded 
her  that  it  was  time  to  get  ready  to  go  to  the 
Porcherons.  This  notification  —  addressed  as 
it  was  to  the  most  majestic  figure  I  have  ever 
seen  in  my  life  —  made  me  burst  with  laughter. 
We  went  upstairs  to  dress,  which  we  did  in  my 
mother's  room,  as  she  had  gone  to  bed,  and 
wished  to  see  our  costumes.  Madame  de  Po- 
tocka's  noble  and  stately  figure  was  somewhat 
coarse,  and  needed  setting  off.  In  her  disguise 
she  lost  all  her  dignity,  and  when  she  had  got 
on  her  jacket,  red  handkerchief,  round  cap,  and 
check  apron,  she  looked  for  all  the  world  like  a 
genuine  cook,  whilst  I,  on  the  contrary,  in  similar 
costume,  lost  nothing  of  my  elegant  and  distin- 
guished air,  and  was  even  more  remarkable  than 
if  I  had  been  tastefully  dressed.  M.  de  Maison- 
neuve  had  sent  an  excuse  in  the  morning,  so,  as 
we  needed  two  men,  we  took  M.  Gillier,  and  set 
oflF  in  a  hackney  coach  at  about  half-past  eleven. 
I  had  the  greatest  success  at  the  '  Great  Con- 
queror,' where  there  was  a  numerous  company, 
and  vanquished,  at  first  sight,  the  runner  of  M. 
le  Marquis  de  Brancas,  who,  waiting  upon  his 
master,  must  have  seen  me  twenty  times  at  table, 
but  did  not  in  the  least  recognise  me.  The 
dress,  which  made  Madame  de  Potocka  look 
considerably  older,  made  me  some  ten  or  twelve 


152  Four  Frenchwomen. 

years  younger ;  I  looked  sixteen  or  seventeen 
at  the  most  ;  and  we  acted  our  parts  so  well  that 
no  one  had  the  least  suspicion  of  our  being  in 
disguise.  I  began  by  dancing  a  minuet  with  the 
runner,  with  the  most  countrified  air  in  the  world, 
and  afterwards  a  quadrille.  In  the  meantime  M. 
Gillier  ordered  some  pigeons  d.  la  crapaudine  " 
[flattened  and  broiled],  "  with  a  salad,  for  our 
refreshment.  We  sat  down  together  at  a  little 
table,  where  the  gaiety  and  gallantry  of  M.  de 
Genlis,  divided  between  Madame  de  Potocka 
and  myself,  delighted  us  exceedingly.  There 
was  always  something  so  original  and  agreeable, 
and,  at  the  same  time,  so  witty  in  his  pleasantry, 
that  he  would  have  amused  the  most  morbid  of 
mortals. 

"  A  finishing  stroke,  however,  was  put  to  our 
merriment  by  a  most  unexpected  occurrence. 
It  was  customary  to  enter  the  guinguette  singing, 
and  presently  we  heard  some  one  bawling  at  the 
top  of  his  voice,  — 

'  Lison  dormait  dans  tin  bocage 
Un  bras  par-ci,  un  bras  par-lh^  etc. 

"  Looking  towards  the  door,  we  saw  two  per- 
sons come  in  singing  and  dancing,  one  dressed 
as  a  servant-girl,  the  other  in  one  of  my  liveries. 
I  knew  them  in  an  instant,  and  jumping  up, 
flung  myself  upon  the  servant's  neck,  for  it  was 


Madame  de  Genii's.  153 

no  other  than  my  mother  leaning  upon  the  arm 
of  M.  de  Maisonneuve.  She  had  contrived  this 
little  trick  with  him,  and  for  this  reason  he  had 
excused  himself.  Our  joy  and  gratitude  were 
unbounded,  and  there  really  was  a  good  deal  of 
grace  and  goodness  in  this  jest  of  a  person  as  old 
as  my  mother  was.  She  sat  down  at  our  table 
with  her  companion,  and  she  and  M.  de  Genlis 
were  the  life  and  soul  of  the  evening  —  one  of 
the  gayest  and  most  charming  that  I  ever  passed 
in  my  life.  I  had  never  laughed  so  much  since 
the  Genlis  and  Sillery  days,  and  it  was  three  in  the 
morning  before  we  tore  ourselves  away  from  the 
*  Great  Conqueror '  of  the  Porcherons." 


V. 


With  the  exception  of  her  acquaintanceship 
with  M.  de  Sauvigny,  Madame  de  Genlis  does 
not  appear  to  have  formed  any  literary  connection 
of  lasting  importance  previous  to  her  entry  of 
Belle  Chasse.  Her  more-than-friendship  with 
the  "  flower  of  pedants,"  La  Harpe,  belongs 
properly  to  the  subsequent  period.  D'Alembert 
she  had  seen  before  her  marriage  ;  he  had  come 
to  hear  her  harp-playing  in  the  Rue  Neuve  St. 
Paul,  but  she  "  disliked  him  extremely."    "  He 


154  Fotir  Frenchwome?!. 

had  a  vulgar  expression  of  face,"  she  said,  "  and 
told  coarse  comical  anecdotes  in  a  shrill  tone 
of  voice."  Of  Raynal,  Marie  de  Corday's 
"  master,"  who  visited  at  Madame  de  Puisieux's, 
she  has  left  a  slight  sketch,  also  en  noir.  As  a 
child  she  had  heard  Marmontel  read  his  tales. 
Something,  too,  she  had  seen  of  the  playwright 
and  librettist,  Sedaine,  whose  flame  yet  flickers 
in  the  ^^Gageure  Imprdvue'"  and  the  ^^ Philosophe 
sans  le  savoir ;  "  musketeer  Dorat  had  written 
her  some  pretty  complimentary  verses ;  Delille 
had  read  part  of  his  yEneid  to  her,  and  she  had 
met  Gibbon  and  Buff"on.  She  had  visited  Vol- 
taire and  known  Rousseau,  and,  as  in  duty 
bound,  she  has  left  lengthy  accounts  of  her 
experiences. 

Her  short  friendship  with  "  Minerva's  owl," 
as  Madame  de  Mirepoix  called  Rousseau,  is 
thoroughly  characteristic  both  of  himself  and 
Madame  la  Comtesse.  He  was  then  at  Paris, 
morbid  as  ever,  neither  making  nor  receiving 
visits,  and,  if  we  may  believe  her  recollections, 
gaining  a  scanty  subsistence  (as  he  had  done 
before)  by  copying  music.  Madame  de  Genlis 
had  not  yet  read  his  works,  and  admired  him 
chiefly  for  his  opera,  the  D^vin  du  Village. 
One  day  M.  de  Sauvigny  told  her  in  confidence 
that  her  husband  was  about  to  play  her  a  trick  — 


Madame  de  Genlis.  155 

in  other  words  to  pass  off  Preville,  the  Foole  of 
the  French  stage,  the  actor  whom  Sterne  calls 
"  Mercury  himself,"  as  the  author  of  Emile,  and 
the  lady  promised  to  appear  the  dupe  of  this  so- 
called  "  mystification,"  a  very  popular,  and  often 
very  unworthy,  amusement  of  the  day. 

"A  Crispin  en  philosophe  !  —  the  idea  was 
delightful.  Unhappily,  M.  de  Genlis  forgot 
his  scheme,  and  some  three  weeks  afterwards 
brought  Simon  Pure  himself  to  visit  his  wife. 
Of  course  she  was  delighted.  The  little  man 
who  appeared  to  her,  with  his  round  wig  and  his 
marron-coloured  stockings,  his  very  coat  and 
attitudes,  presented  the  most  perfect  take-off  to 
her  appreciative  eyes.  Moreover,  as  it  was 
only  Preville,  there  was  not  the  least  necessity 
for  any  ceremony.  So  she  sang  the  airs  of  the 
Ddvin,  laughed,  played,  talked  of  everything 
that  came  into  her  head  —  in  short,  was  unusu- 
ally genuine  and  delightful,  and,  to  the  eyes  of 
her  astonished  husband,  excessively  eccentric, 
to  say  the  least  of  it.  Rousseau,  quite  unaccus- 
tomed to  such  charming  freshness  and  simplicity, 
was  so  pleased  that  he  actually  promised  to  dine 
with  them  next  day.  Of  course  when  he  was 
gone  there  was  naturally  a  full  explanation,  and 
extreme  confusion,  perhaps  vexation,  upon  the 
part  of  the  lady  when  she  discovered  her  mis- 


156  Four  Frenchwomen. 

take.  However,  no  harm  was  done  ;  the  matter 
was  kept  a  secret,  and  the  —  for  once  —  unsus- 
pecting Rousseau  told  M.  de  Sauvigny  that  he 
considered  the  young  countess  to  be  a  jeune  per- 
sonne  "  the  most  unaffected,  cheerful,  and  devoid 
of  pretensions  he  had  ever  met  with." 

For  the  lady,  she  never  knew  "  a  less  impos- 
ing or  more  kindly  man  of  letters.  He  spoke 
simply  of  himself,  and  without  bitterness  of  his 
enemies."  He  did  full  justice  to  the  talents  of 
Voltaire,  but  added  that  pride  and  flatteries  had 
spoiled  him.  He  had  already  read  some  of  his 
Confessions  to  Madame  d'Egmont,  but  he  con- 
sidered that  our  countess  was  far  too  young  for 
such  a  confidence.  She  had  not  yet  read  Emile  ; 
she  would  do  well  to  do  so  when  she  was  older, 
he  said.  His  works,  indeed,  he  mentioned  fre- 
quently. He  had  written  all  the  letters  of  Jt^/Ze 
on  fancy  note-paper  with  vignettes,  he  told  them, 
then  folded  them,  and  read  and  re-read  them  in 
his  walks,  as  if  he  had  really  received  them  from 
his  mistress.  "  He  had  most  piercing  eyes,  and 
a  delightful  smile,  full  oi  finesse  and  sweetness." 

An  acquaintance  with  Rousseau,  however, 
could  not  endure  for  ever.  For  five  months  he 
dined  with  them  nearly  every  day.  He  was 
very  gay  and  communicative,  and  she  discovered 
in  him  neither  susceptibility  nor  caprice.      At 


Madame  de  Genii's.  157 

last,  as  ill-fortune  would  have  it,  he  praised  some 
Sillery  that  he  had  tasted,  and  expressed  a  will- 
ingness to  receive  a  couple  of  bottles.  M.  de 
Genlis  courteously  forwarded  a  case  of  five-and- 
twenty.  Rousseau's  morbid  hatred  of  patronage 
took  the  alarm  instanter.  Back  came  the  case 
with  a  laconic  epistle  breathing  flames  and  fury, 
and  renouncing  the  donors  for  ever.  But  this 
time  the  countess  wrote  an  apologetic  letter, 
and  managed  adroitly  to  patch  up  the  wound. 
On  the  next  occasion  she  was  not  so  successful. 
She  had  managed  to  persuade  him  to  accompany 
her  to  the  first  representation  of  M.  de  Sauvigny's 
Persiffleur.  He  had  a  great  dislike  to  being 
seen  ;  but  she  had  procured  a  grated  box  with  a 
private  entry.  Upon  reaching  the  theatre  he 
objected  to  the  closing  of  the  grate,  and  his 
presence  was,  in  consequence,  soon  discovered 
by  the  house,  who  afterwards  forgot  him  for  the 
piece.  To  the  astonishment  of  his  companions, 
he  grew  frightfully  sombre,  refused  to  return  to 
supper  with  them,  or  to  listen  to  their  protesta- 
tions, and  the  next  day  declared  he  would  never 
see  them  as  long  as  he  lived,  for  they  had  ex- 
hibited him  like  a  wild  beast.  This  time  the 
case  was  hopeless,  and  although  the  lady  was 
able  at  a  later  period  to  render  him  some  small 
service,  she  felt  no  desire  for  any  further  inti- 


158  Four  Frenchwomen. 

macy  with  the  sensitive  philosopher  of  the  Rue 
Platri^re. 

Of  Voltaire  she  can  only  say,  Vidi  tantum. 
In  1776,  she  was  travelling  for  her  health  under 
the  escort  of  M.  Gillier  and  a  German  painter 
of  the  name  of  Ott,  Being  at  Geneva,  she  wrote 
for  permission  to  visit  Voltaire  at  Ferney,  and 
received  a  most  gracious  reply.  He  would  re- 
sign his  dressing-gown  and  slippers  in  her  favour, 
he  answered,  and  invited  her  to  dinner  and 
supper.  It  was  the  custom  (she  says)  for  his 
visitors,  especially  the  younger  ladies,  to  pale, 
and  stammer,  and  even  faint  upon  their  presen- 
tation to  the  great  man  ;  this,  in  fact,  was  the 
etiquette  of  the  Ferney  court.  Madame  la 
Comtesse,  although  unwilling  to  be  pathetic, 
determined  at  least  to  put  aside  her  habitual  sim- 
plicity, to  be  less  reserved,  and,  above  all,  less 
silent. 

With  her  she  took  M.  Ott,  who  had  never 
read  a  line  of  the  author,  but  was,  nevertheless, 
overflowing  with  the  requisite  enthusiasm.  They 
passed  on  their  way  the  church  which  he  had 
built,  with  its  superscription  of  "  Voltaire  d. 
Dieu,"  which  made  her  shudder.  They  arrived 
three-quarters  of  an  hour  too  soon,  but  she 
piously  consoled  herself  by  thinking  that  she  had 
possibly  prevented  the  penning  of  a  few  addi- 


Madame  de  Genlis,  159 

tional  blasphemies.  In  the  antechamber  they 
discovered  a  Correggio,  whilst  occupying  the 
place  of  honour  in  the  drawing-room  was  a  veri- 
table signboard,  upon  which  Voltaire  was  repre- 
sented as  a  victorious  archangel  trampling  his 
grovelling  Pompignans  and  Frerons  under  his 
feet.  They  were  received  by  Madame  Denis 
(the  heroine  of  that  unseemly  and  unfortunate 
flight  from  the  great  Frederick)  and  Madame 
de  St.  Julien,  who  told  them  that  Voltaire  would 
shortly  appear.  In  the  interim  Madame  de  St. 
Julien  took  her  for  a  ramble,  very  much  to  the 
detriment  of  an  elaborate  toilette,  which  she 
confesses  she  had  not  neglected.  Indeed,  when 
at  last  she  hears  that  the  great  man  is  ready  to 
receive  her,  a  passing  glance  in  the  glass  assures 
her,  to  her  complete  discomforture,  that  she  pre- 
sents an  utterly  tumbled  and  pitiable  appearance. 
Madame  de  St.  Julien  had  advised  her  to  sa- 
lute Voltaire,  adding  that  he  would  certainly  be 
pleased.  But  he  took  her  hand  and  kissed  it, 
which  act  of  respect  was  quite  sufficient  to  make 
her  embrace  him  with  great  good  will.  M.  Ott 
was  almost  transported  to  tears  upon  his  in- 
troduction. He  produced  some  miniatures  of 
sacred  subjects,  which  immediately  drew  from 
M.  de  Voltaire  a  few  critical  remarks  which  were 
highly  offensive  to  his  rigorous  lady  visitor.     At 


i6o  Four  Frenchwomen. 

dinner,  she  says,  he  seemed  anything  but  amia- 
ble, appearing  to  be  always  in  a  passion  with 
the  servants,  and  calling  to  them  at  the  top  of 
his  voice,  w^hich  was,  however,  one  of  his  habits 
of  which  she  had  already  been  warned.  After 
dinner  Madame  Denis  played  to  them  upon  the 
harpsichord  in  an  old-fashioned  style  which  car- 
ried her  auditress  back  to  the  reign  of  Louis 
XIV.,  and  after  that  their  host  took  them  for 
a  drive  in  his  berime.  Madame  la  Comtesse 
shall  finish  in  her  own  words  :  — 

"  He  took  us  into  the  village  [of  Ferney]  to 
see  the  houses  he  had  built  and  the  benevolent 
institutions  that  he  had  established.  He  is 
greater  there  than  in  his  books,  for  one  sees 
everywhere  a  well-directed  goodness  'of  heart, 
and  one  can  hardly  conceive  that  the  same  hand 
which  wrote  so  many  impious,  false,  and  wicked 
things,  should  have  performed  such  useful,  wise, 
and  noble  actions.  He  showed  the  village  to 
every  stranger  who  came  to  visit  him,  but  he 
did  It  unaffectedly,  spoke  with  the  utmost  sim- 
plicity and  good  feeling  on  the  subject,  ac- 
quainted us  with  everything  that  he  had  done, 
without  the  least  appearance  of  boasting,  and  I 
know  no  one  who  could  do  as  much.  When 
we  got  back  to  the  chateau  the  conversation 
was  very  lively  ;  we  talked  with  great  interest 


Madame  de  Genii's.  i6r 

of  all  that  we  had  seen.     I  did  not  leave  till 
night-time.  .   .  . 

"  All  the  busts  and  portraits  of  him  "  [and  they 
may  be  numbered  by  hundreds]  "  are  very  like, 
but  no  artist  has  ever  rendered  his  eyes.  I  ex- 
pected to  find  them  brilliant  and  full  of  fire,  and 
they  were  certainly  the  liveliest  I  ever  saw,  but 
they  had  something  unspeakably  '  velvety '  and 
sweet  about  them.  The  whole  soul  of  Zaire  lay  in 
those  eyes  of  his.  His  smile  and  his  extremely 
malicious  laugh  entirely  altered  this  charming 
expression  of  the  face.  He  was  greatly  broken, 
and  an  old-fashioned  manner  of  dressing  made 
him  look  older  still.  He  had  a  sepulchral  voice, 
which  had  a  most  curious  effect,  particularly  as 
he  had  a  habit  of  talking  very  loud,  although  he 
was  not  deaf.  "When  neither  religion  nor  his 
enemies  were  discussed,  his  conversation  was 
simple,  natural,  and  unpretentious,  and  conse- 
quently, with  such  wit  and  talent  as  he  pos- 
sessed, perfectly  delightful.  It  seemed  to  me 
that  he  could  not  bear  that  any  one  should  have, 
on  any  point,  a  different  opinion  from  his  own, 
and  when  opposed  in  the  slightest  degree  his 
manner  became  bitter  and  cutting.  He  had 
certainly  lost  much  of  the  politeness  which  he 
should  have  had,  but  this  was  quite  natural. 
Since  he  has  lived  here  people  only  visit  him 


1 62  Four  Frenchwomen. 

to  praise  him  to  the  skies,  his  decisions  are 
oracles,  every  one  about  him  is  at  his  feet,  he 
hears  of  nothing  but  the  admiration  that  he  in- 
spires, and  the  most  ridiculous  exaggerations 
only  appear  to  him  as  ordinary  homages."  .  .  . 

While  at  Zurich  (we  carefully  follow  her  in 
omitting  the  date,  although  it  was  possibly  about 
this  time)  she  made  an  expedition  to  the  country 
house  of  a  now  half-forgotten  idyllist  and  land- 
scape-painter, whose  dust-crowned  Death  of  Abel 
may  now  and  then  be  discovered  in  a  neglected 
corner  of  the  book-case  hiding  under  cover  of 
Klopstock's  Messiah  —  Solomon  Gessner. 

His  First  Navigator  (which  Gardel,  by  the 
way,  had  turned  into  a  ballet)  is,  he  tells  her, 
his  favourite  work,  for  he  had  composed  it  for 
his  wife  in  the  commencement  of  their  court- 
ship. 

"  I  had  a  great  curiosity  to  make  the  acquaint- 
ance of  the  lady  whom  he  had  married  for  love, 
and  who  had  made  him  a  poet.  I  pictured  her 
to  myself  as  a  charming  bergdre,  and  I  expected 
that  Gessner's  house  would  be  an  elegant  thatched 
cottage,  surrounded  by  shrubberies  and  flowers, 
where  nothing  was  drunk  but  milk,  and  where, 
to  use  the  German  expression,  every  one  walked 
on  roses.  But  when  I  arrived  there  I  crossed 
a  little  garden  filled  with  cabbages  and  carrots, 


Madame  de  Genii's.  163 

that  began  somewhat  to  discompose  my  dream- 
ings  of  eclogues  and  idyls,  which  were  entirely 
upset,  on  entering  the  room,  by  a  positive  cloud 
of  tobacco-smoke,  through  which  I  dimly  per- 
ceived Gessner  drinking  beer  and  pulling  at  his 
pipe  by  the  side  of  a  good  lady  in  a  jacket  and 
cap  who  was  placidly  knitting  —  it  was  Madame 
Gessner.  But  the  good-natured  greeting  of  the 
husband  and  wife,  their  perfect  union,  their  ten- 
derness for  their  children,  and  their  simplicity, 
recall  to  mind  the  manners  and  the  virtues  which 
the  poet  has  sung ;  it  is  always  an  idyl  and  the 
golden  age,  not  indeed  in  splendid  sounding 
verse,  but  in  simple  and  unadorned  language. 
Gessner  draws  and  paints  landscape  in  water- 
colour  after  a  superior  fashion  ;  he  has  sketched 
all  the  sites  that  he  has  described  in  his  poems. 
He  gave  me  a  beautiful  sketch  that  he  had 
done." 

Rousseau  in  his  self-imposed  misery  at  Paris, 
Voltaire  in  his  court  at  Ferney,  and  this  simple 
poet  and  landscape-painter  among  his  cabbages 
and  carrots,  are  pictures  curiously  contrasted. 
Were  it  not  for  want  of  space,  we  might  have 
been  betrayed  into  a  moral — "  d  notre  manUre.''' 


164  Four  Frenchwomen, 


VI. 


*'  We  must  represent  to  ourselves  all  fashiona- 
ble female  Europe,  at  this  time,"  says  Thacke- 
ray, speaking,  parenthetically,  of  the  beautiful 
Lady  Coventry,  whose  death  was  hastened  by 
immoderate  painting,  "  as  plastered  with  white, 
and  raddled  with  red."  The  next  occurrence 
in  the  life  of  Madame  la  Comtesse  to  which 
we  can  assign  a  bond-fide  date  concerns  this 
popular  custom.  On  the  25th  of  January,  1776, 
she  left  off  rouge.  The  resignation  had  a  grave 
significance  in  those  days.  It  implied  the  giv- 
ing up  of  pretentions  to  youth,  and  pomps  and 
vanities  generally  ;  and  was,  in  fact^  a  polite 
"  notice  to  friends"  that  the  quondam  illumina- 
tor was  about  to  betake  herself  to  the  half-lights 
and  the  sad-coloured  raiment  which  announced 
the  ddvote.  Our  heroine  laments  rather  comi- 
cally that  *'  having  always  had  religious  senti- 
ments, it  is  singular  that  many  of  her  sacrifices 
in  this  way  should  have  had,  nevertheless,  a 
merely  mundane  origin,"  for  it  appears  that  the 
present  step,  in  spite  of  its  importance,  was 
rather  the  result  of  an  accident  than  a  conscien- 
tious abnegation  of  her  personal  advantages. 
Eight  years    before,  at    Villers-Cotterets,   the 


Madame  de  Genlis.  165 

talk  happening  to  turn  upon  some  elderly  ladies 
who  still  clung  to  the  carnations  of  the  Rue  St. 
Honor^,  Madame  de  Genlis  had  said  that  she 
could  not  understand  how  the  quitting  of  rouge 
could  possibly  be  a  sacrifice.  This  inconceiva- 
ble statement  being  questioned,  she  declared 
that  she  would  leave  it  off  at  thirty.  M.  de 
Chartres  politely  pooh-poohed  her  decision,  and 
she  consequently  bet  him  a  discriiion  —  a  wager 
in  which  no  sum  or  article  is  named  —  that  she 
would  perform  her  promise.  She  did  so,  as  we 
have  said,  and  this  is  the  way  in  which  the  affair 
was  fully  completed  :  — 

"  Some  fifteen  days  before  my  birthday,  I 
begged  M.  de  Chartres  to  remember  my  discre- 
tion, and  on  the  25th  of  January  I  discovered  in 
my  room  a  doll  as  large  as  life  seated  at  my 
desk,  pen  in  hand,  and  wearing  a  head-dress 
of  millions  [  I  ]  of  quills.  Upon  one  side  of 
the  desk  was  a  ream  of  splendid  paper,  and 
upon  the  other  thirty-two  blank  octavo  books, 
bound  in  green  morocco,  with  twenty-four 
smaller  ones  which  were  bound  in  red.  At 
the  feet  of  the  figure  lay  a  case  filled  with  note- 
paper,  letter-covers,  sealing-wax,  gold  and  silver 
powder,  knife,  scissors,  rule,  compass,  etc.,  etc. 
I  was  charmed  with  my  present,  and  I  have 
never  since  worn  rouge." 


1 66  Four  Frenchwomen. 

Long  before,  she  says,  it  had  been  agreed 
privately  between  herself  and  the  Duchess  of 
Chartres  that  if  the  duchess  had  a  daughter, 
Madame  de  Genlis  should  be  her  governess. 
According  to  the  prevailing  practice,  the  prin- 
cesses of  the  blood  had  been  hitherto  brought 
up  by  an  under-governor,  who  took  charge  of 
them  up  to  the  age  of  fourteen  or  fifteen.  Ma- 
dame la  Comtesse,  justly  deciding  that  this  — 
looking  to  the  value  of  first  impressions  —  was 
too  precious  an  interval  to  be  lost,  had  declared 
her  intention  of  taking  them  from  their  earliest 
years,  and  had,  moreover,  determined  to  retire 
with  them  into  a  convent.  When,  in  August, 
1777,  the  duchess  became  the  mother  of  twins, 
they  were  temporarily  confided  to  the'  care  of 
Madame  de  Rochambeau,  and,  in  pursuance  of 
the  above-mentioned  arrangement,  a  pavilion 
was  built  in  the  neighbouring  convent  of  Belle 
Chasse,  which  the  countess  finally  entered  with 
her  charges. 

The  pavilion  in  question  lay  in  the  centre  of 
the  garden  of  the  convent,  with  which  it  was 
connected  by  a  trellised  colonnade  overhung 
with  vines.  She  seems  to  have  at  once  con- 
ceived a  definite  idea  of  her  duties,  and  to 
have  carried  it  out  consistently  to  the  end. 
The  household  was  ordered  with  the  strictest 


Madame  de  Genii's.  167 

economy,  the  furniture  was  simple,  and  more 
useful  than  ornamental.  "  I  endeavoured,"  she 
says,  "  to  make  even  the  furniture  subserve  to 
my  scheme  of  education."  With  this  view  the 
wails  were  painted  with  medallions  of  all  the 
Roman  emperors,  carefully  dated,  the  fire- 
screens exposed  the  kings  of  France,  while, 
for  convenience  of  reference,  the  hand-screens 
were  devoted  to  the  gods  and  goddesses.  Ge- 
ography was  remanded  to  the  stairs,  the  maps 
of  the  south  lying  at  the  bottom,  and  those  of 
the  north  at  the  top,  so  that  the  pleased  ob- 
server starting  from  "  the  palms  and  temples  " 
of  the  lowest  step,  slipped  through  "eternal 
summer  "  somewhere  in  the  middle  of  the  flight, 
and  discovered  the  "  North-West  Passage"  at 
the  summit.  Over  the  doors,  again,  were  scenes 
from  Roman  history ;  over  the  grating,  in  letters 
of  gold,  was  a  sentence  from  the  Spectator, 
"  True  happiness  is  of  a  retired  nature,  and  an 
enemy  to  pomp  and  noise."  In  all  this  we  re- 
cognise the  heroine  of  St.  Aubin  and  Sillery  — 
but  she  is  at  her  best. 

She  had  soon  almost  a  school.  Besides  Mile. 
Adelaide  d'Orleans,  whose  twin-sister  died  at 
five,  her  own  daughters,  Caroline  and  Pulcherie, 
lived  with  her.  I  n  the  first  year  of  her  residence 
at  the  convent  she  received  a  niece,  Henriette  de 


1 68  Four  Frenchwomen. 

Sercey, later  a  nephew, Cesar,  and  "a  little  Eng- 
lish girl,  the  celebrated  Pamela."  Of  Pamela 
the  world  will  probably  never  know  more  than 
Madame  la  Comtesse  has  chosen  to  tell.  She 
was  sent  from  England  —  the  story  goes  —  in 
accordance  with  the  duke's  request,  in  order  to 
help  to  perfect  his  children  in  the  English  lan- 
guage. "  Her  name  was  Nancy  Syms ;  I  called 
her  Pamela  ;  she  did  not  know  a  word  of  French, 
and  in  playing  with  the  little  princesses  she  con- 
tributed greatly  to  familiarise  them  with  the 
English  language."  In  1782,  the  duke,  to  the 
great  disgust  of  Palais  Royal  place-hunters, 
boldly  made  Madame  de  Genlis  Governor  of  his 
three  sons,  the  Duke  of  Valois  (Louis  Philippe), 
then  nine,  the  Duke  of  Montpensier,  seven,  and 
the  little  Count  of  Beaujolais,  who  was  about 
three  years  old.  She  gave  them  a  thoroughly 
practical  education.  The  princes  rose  at  seven, 
had  lessons  with  their  masters  in  Latin  and  arith- 
metic until  eleven,  at  which  time  they  came  to 
their  Governor,  with  whom  they  remained  until 
ten,  when  the  convent  was  closed.  She  gave 
them  masters  in  botany,  chemistry,  and  drawing 
—  she  invented  a  historical  magic-lantern,  the 
slides  of  which  were  painted  with  scenes  from 
"  sacred,  ancient,  and  Roman  history,  together 
with  that  of  China  and  Japan."     She  was  the 


Madame  de  Genlis.  169 

first  governor,  she  says,  who  taught  languages 
by  conversation  —  her  pupils  took,  their  morning 
v^'alk.  in  German,  they  dined  in  English,  and  they 
supped  in  Italian. 

When  she  received  the  princes  the  duke  had 
promised  to  buy  them  a  country  house.  He 
bought  the  estate  of  St.  Leu,  where  they  spent 
eight  months  of  the  year.  Here  they  gardened, 
botanised,  and  practised  chemistry.  -  Their  Gov- 
ernor, mindful  of  her  old  tastes,  made  them 
act  voyages  in  the  park  (notably  those  of  Vasco 
de  Gama  and  Snelgrave),  which  were  arranged 
dramatically  from  La  Harpe's  abridgement  of 
Prevdt's  collection,  and  in  these  performances 
the  whole  establishment  took  part.  In  the  great 
dining-room  they  had  historical  tableaux,  which 
David  often  grouped  for  them  ;  a  theatre  was 
built  in  which  they  acted  all  the  pieces  out  of 
the  Thddtre  d'  E  due  alio  n.  In  the  winter  the 
indefatigable  instructress  taught  them  to  make 
portfolios,  ribbons,  wigs,  pasteboard-work, 
marble-paper,  and  artificial  flowers ;  to  gild,  to 
turn,  and  to  carpenter  generally.  The  Duke  of 
Valois  in  particular  was  an  excellent  joiner. 
When  they  went  out  it  was  still  in  pursuit  of 
instruction  :  they  visited  museums  and  manufac- 
tories which  they  had  coached  up  in  the  Ency- 
clop6die,  thereby  giving  their  Governor  an  oppor- 


170  Four  Frenchwomen. 

tunity  of  declaring  that  the  descriptions  in  that 
valuable  work,  are  often  faulty.  On  the  whole, 
this  practico-historico-histrionical  education,  as 
it  would  then  have  been  described,  seems  to 
have  worked  successfully.  At  worst  it  was  a 
decided  advance  upon  the  former  system.  The 
pupils  were  happy  and  pleased  with  their  teacher 
—  she  herself  "led  a  delicious  life  at  Belle 
Chasse."  Its  chief  fault,  as  many  critics  have 
already  pointed  out,  seems  to  have  been  that  an 
education  so  universal  must  of  necessity  be 
superficial,  and  that  a  life  so  fruitful  in  facts 
could  have  left  but  little  room  for  the  develop- 
ment of  natural  impulses,  or  the  growth  of  those 
mere  flowers  of  fancy  and  of  life  that  neither  toil 
nor  spin. 

One  does  not  easily  recognise  the  cook-maid 
of  the  Porcherons,  or  the  mistress  of  the  revels 
at  Vaudreull,  in  this  energetic  and  indefatigable 
preceptress  of  the  convent  at  Belle  Chasse.  In 
those  old  dialogues  of  Passy  and  Origny,  dia- 
logues which  she  continues  now  as  ever,  we 
heard  her  vaunting  her  shadowy  interlocutor  and 
imaginary  counsellor  as  far  superior  to  that 
"  faithful  admonition  of  a  friend,"  most  needful, 
one  would  imagine,  to  a  mind  like  hers,  "  ever 
infused  and  drenched,"  as  Bacon  says,  "  in  its 
affections   and   customs."      "  My    (imaginary) 


Madame  de  Genii's.  171 

friend,"  she  says,  "  interrupted  or  interrogated 
me  ;  her  surprise,  her  admiration,  and  her  eulo- 
gies enchanted  me.  .  .  .  "What  human  friend 
can  enter  into  our  sentiments,  can  love  us,  can 
understand  us  so  well  as  the  fictitious  one  whom 
we  create  for  ourselves  ? " 

Yet  in  the  extracts  from  the  journals  of  the 
education  of  her  pupils  we  find  her  penning  such 
words  as  these  :  — 

"  You  will  know  your  friends  —  if  they  never 
flatter  you  ;  if  they  give  you  salutary  advice  at 
the  risk  of  displeasing  you  for  the  moment.  .  .  . 
If  you  meet  with  friends  worthy  of  you,  you  are 
bound  to  render  them  all  the  services  you  can 
perform,  without  being  unjust  to  others.  .  .  . 
You  ought  not  to  suffer  any  one  of  your  friends 
to  be  accused  of  any  offence  against  yourself 
without  proofs,  especially  to  your  private  ear. 
Distrust  every  one  who  attempts  to  give  you  a 
bad  opinion  of  your  friends ;  envy  is  almost 
always  the  motive  of  these  informations,  and 
when  they  are  not  supported  by  positive  proofs 
you  ought  to  despise  them,  and  impose  silence 
by  an  air  of  coldness  and  of  complete  incredulity 
upon  those  who  are  the  informers."  If  proofs 
are  adduced,  "  before  taking  any  decided  step 
you  ought  to  have  a  clear  and  frank  explanation 
with    your   friend,  for  it  is   only  thus  that   he 


172  Four  Frenchwomen. 

can  justify  himself,  and  you  would  yourself  be 
blamable  if  you  did  not  furnish  him  all  the  means 
in  your  power  for  doing  so." 

Is  Madame  la  Comtesse  writing  from  convic- 
tion ?  or  is  she  romancing  en  pedagogue  —  just 
discharging  the  last  coachful  of  second-hand 
moralities  ?  We  cannot  pretend  to  decide.  The 
sounds  which  we  strike  out  of  this  "harp  of 
thousand  strings  "  of  ours  are  often  discordant 
and  contradictory  enough,  and  even  our  moralist, 
good  harpist  as  she  was,  could  not  make  her  life 
harmonious.  At  least,  the  extracts  show  that 
the  Governor,  dating  from  the  class-room,  could 
write  nobly  enough  of  friends.  Yet  it  is  one  of 
the  saddest  things  of  these  Memoirs  that  she 
never  seems  to  have  had  a  dear  or  worthy  friend. 
Secure  in  her  self-reliance,  she  grew  old  in  all 
those  faults  which  the  "faithful  admonition" 
would  have  mitigated  or  corrected. 

At  Belle  Chasse  she  married  both  her  daugh- 
ters—  the  elder  to  a  Belgian  nobleman,  M. 
Becelaer  de  Lawoestine,  the  younger  to  a  M.  de 
Valence.  At  Belle  Chasse,  too,  she  acquired 
both  her  credit  and  discredit  as  an  author.  In 
1779-80  she  published,  under  the  title  of  TliMlre 
d"  Education,  some  little  dramatic  pieces  for  the 
benefit  of  three  officers  who  had  been  sentenced 
to  a  fine  or  imprisonment  for  life.     The  publi- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  173 

cation,  under  such  circumstance,  of  these  little 
moral  comedies,  which,  like  Mr.  Pitt's  early 
tragedy,  had  no  love  in  them,  "  succeeded,"  she 
writes  to  Gibbon,  *'  beyond  all  her  hopes." 
Already,  when,  in  the  winter  of  1777  and  1778, 
her  daughters  had  played  them  at  the  Palais 
Royal,  they  had  gained  for  their  authoress  the 
approbation  of  the  King-Critic,  La  Harpe,  who, 
in  his  complimentary  verses,  "  adored,  at  once, 
the  author,  the  work,  and  the  actresses." 

"  He  became  so  passionately  attached  to  me," 
she  afterwards  says,  "  that  I  was  obliged  seri- 
ously to  restrain  his  enthusiasm."  The  affair 
turned  out  in  the  "  grand  style."  M.  de  La 
Harpe  went  away  to  Lyons  to  cure  his  com- 
plaint, and  happily  for  his  peace,  returned  heart- 
whole.  After  this  wind-up  "  in  the  grand  style," 
however,  the  matter  appears  to  have  ended  in 
the  little  style — by  a  literary  quarrel. 

"  We  have  here,"  says  Franklin,  writing  from 
Passy,  in  1782,  to  Mrs.  Hewson,  "a  female 
writer  on  education,  who  has  lately  published 
three  volumes,  which  are  much  talked  of.  .  .  . 
They  are  much  praised  and  censured."  The 
work  referred  to  was  Ai^/^  el  Theodore,  or  Lettres 
sur  lEducation,  her  most  important  effort,  and 
one  which  procured  her,  she  says,  at  once  "  the 
suffrages  of  the  public,  and   the   irreconcilable 


174  Poi''^  Frenchwomen. 

hatred  of  all  the  so-called  philosophers  and  their 
partisans."  Indeed,  the  satire  of  reigning  follies, 
the  less  defensible  portraiture  of  individuals  (of 
which  she  was  accused),  and  above  all,  her  open 
opposition  to  the  powerful  contemporary  phi- 
losophy, was  not  calculated  to  conciliate  the 
reigning  powers  in  literature,  or  to  acquire  her 
crowds  of  friends.  AdHe  el  Thdodore  was  fol- 
lowed, in  1784,  by  the  Veilldes  du  Clidteau,  in 
which  she  pursued  the  same  uncompromising 
course,  and  yet  appears  to  have  been  greatly 
disgusted  by  the  award  of  the  Monthyon  prize 
to  Madame  d'Epinay  for  the  second  volume  of 
the  Conversations  d'Emilie.  Our  authoress,  of 
course,  ascribes  this  blow  to  her  enemies  of  the 
Enc/clopMie.  "  Madame  d'Epinay  was  a  phi- 
losopher, and  took  good  care  not  to  talk  of  re- 
ligion to  her  Emily."  Her  work  in  1787,  On 
Religion  considered  as  the  only  sure  Foundation 
of  Happiness  and  of  true  Philosophy,  which  she 
wrote  for  the  first  communion  of  the  Duke  of 
Valois,  put  the  finishing  stroke  to  her  reputation 
as  a  Mtre  de  VEglise,  and  opponent  of  liberty  of 
conscience.  Her  position  was  not  an  enviable 
one.  The  Palais  Royal  place-hunters  hated  her, 
her  political  opponents  hated  her,  and  the  phi- 
losophers hated  her.  She  seems  to  have  lived 
through  a  hail  of  epigrams,  of  many  of  which 


Madame  de  Genlis.  175 

only  readers  of  the  Actes  des  Apdtres  can  con- 
ceive the  obscenity.  The  wits  found  out  the 
unfortunate  similitude  between  her  favourite  in- 
strument and  her  critic-lover,  and  christened  her 
works  Les  CEuvres  de  la  Harpe.  Rivarol  de- 
clared that  "  she  had  no  sex  "  —  "  that  Heaven 
had  refused  the  magic  of  talent  to  her  produc- 
tions as  it  had  refused  the  charm  of  innocence 
to  her  childhood."  They  caricatured  her  armed 
with  a  rod  and  a  stick  of  barley-sugar,  and 
finally,  turning  from  the  preceptress  to  the 
pietist,  they  wrote,  — 

"  NoaiUes  et  Sillery,  ces  mh'es  de  I'Eglise, 
Voudraient  gagner  le  parlement ; 
Soil  qit'cn  les  vote,  on  qn'on  les  Use 

Pa7-  malheur  on  devient  aussitdt  Protestant^ 

We  do  not  pretend  to  admire  Madame  de 
Genlis,  nor  is  there  evidence  to  rehabilitate  her 
if  one  would.  Yet,  in  appending  here  her  por- 
trait as  it  has  at  this  time  been  drawn,  it  is  but 
fair  to  remind  the  reader  that  it  is  from  the  pen 
of  a  friend  of  the  Duchess  of  Chartres,  and 
consequently  of  an  opponent  to  the  countess. 
"  I  did  not  like  her,"  says  the  Baroness  d'Ober- 
kirch,  in  her  Memoirs,  "spite  of  her  accom- 
plishments and  the  charm  of  her  conversation  ; 
she  was  too  systematic  :  she  is  a  woman  who 
has  laid  aside  the  flowing  robes  of  her  sex  for 


176  Four  Frenchwomen. 

the  cap  and  gown  "  [we  permit  ourselves  to 
change  the  term]  "of  a  pedagogue.  Besides, 
nothing  about  her  is  natural.  She  is  con- 
stantly in  an  attitude,  as  it  were,  thinking 
that  her  portrait,  moral  or  physical,  is  being 
taken.  She  attaches  too  much  importance  to 
her  celebrity  —  she  thinks  too  much  of  her  own 
opinions.  One  of  the  great  follies  of  this  mas- 
culine woman  is  her  harp  ;  she  carries  it  about 
with  her.  She  speaks  of  it  when  it  is  not  near 
—  she  plays  upon  a  crust  of  bread,  and  practises 
with  a  piece  of  packthread.  When  she  perceives 
that  any  one  is  looking  at  her,  she  rounds  her 
arm,  pinches  up  her  mouth,  assumes  a  senti- 
mental look  and  attitude,  and  begins,  to  move 
her  fingers."  ...  At  a  party  at  Madame  de 
Massais'  she  "  sat  in  the  centre  of  the  assembly, 
sang,  talked, commanded,  commented, and  ended 
by  putting  the  entire  concert  into  confusion. 
Most  certainly  the  young  Princes  of  Orleans 
have  a  most  singular  Governor,  who  is  ever  act- 
ing the  tutor,  and  who  never  forgets  her  r6le  but 
when  she  ought  most  to  remember  it."  Madame 
la  Comtesse  has  left  us  no  portrait  of  Madame 
la  Baronne. 


Madame  de  Genii s.  177 


VII. 

Madame  de  Genlis  had  long  been  meditat- 
ing a  descent  upon  England.  Already  some 
years  before  Gibbon  had  been  charged  to  pro- 
cure her  lodgings  at  London.  But  she  had  not 
been  able  to  carry  out  her  intention,  and  had 
consoled  herself  by  making  the  acquaintance  of 
some  of  our  best  authors.  "  I  now  know  Eng- 
lish perfectly,"  she  informs  him,  in  one  of  the 
letters  which  he  apparently  never  had  the  civility 
to  answer,  and  the  statement  is  confirmed  by 
Miss  Burney,  who  tells  the  king  that  she  ex- 
pressed herself  in  the  language  very  readily,  and 
with  exceeding  ease.  "  As  a  proof,"  she  goes 
on  to  Gibbon,  "  I  read  Shakespeare  with  the 
greatest  facility ;  but  my  favourite  poet  is 
Milton,  whom  I  like  so  well  as  to  know  a  con- 
siderable portion  of  Paradise  Lost  by  heart.  I 
also  know  a  good  many  verses  of  Pope ;  but 
I  should  make  you  laugh  if  you  heard  me  read 
them."  For  a  Frenchwoman  of  her  time  her 
knowledge  of  English  literature  was,  in  truth, 
very  extensive.  With  our  dramatic  authors  in 
particular  she  seems  to  have  been  thoroughly 
conversant,  for  she   plodded  through  them  all 


178  Four  Frenchwomen. 

from  Shakespeare  and  Ben  Jonson  downwards 
during  her  residence  at  Bury.  A  propos  of  our 
comedies,  she  told  Miss  Burney  that  no  woman 
ought  to  go  and  see  them  ;  and,  indeed,  the 
calm  student  of  Farquhar's  Trip  lo  the  Jubilee, 
or  Congreve's  Love  for  Love  —  plays  which  the 
prudish  Evelinas  and  Cecilias  went  to  see  with 
their  impossible  Lord  Orvilles  —  can  hardly  fail 
to  wonder  that  the  rigorous  and  respectable  com- 
pany were  "  perpetually  out  of  countenance  "  at 
their  extreme  indelicacy. 

At  last,  in  1785,  she  left  her  pupils  at  St.  Leu, 
and  "in  the  pleasant  month  of  June"  a  soft 
Etesian  gale  wafted  over  the  illustrious  visitor  to 
our  hospitable  shores.  The  trip,  her  record  tells 
us,  was  "  exceedingly  brilliant."  The  public 
prints  teamed  with  the  most  obliging  notices, 
and  the  most  complimentary  verses,  amongst  the 
rest  an  ode  by  Hayley.  At  one  of  the  theatres 
(she  says)  Hamlet  was  performed  in  her  honour; 
Lord  Inchiquin  took  her  to  the  House  of  Com- 
mons. By  desire  of  the  Prince  of  Wales,  Lord 
William  Gordon  entertained  her  at  his  house, 
and  the  "  First  Gentleman  in  Europe  "  "  paid 
great  attention "  to  the  illustrious  adviser  of 
Philippe  Egalitd.  Burke  invited  her  to  his 
country  seat,  and  afterwards  carried  her  to 
Oxford.    While  with  him  she  made  the  acquaint- 


Madame  de  Genii's.  179 

ance  of  the  "  Chevalier  Reinolds,"  as  she  calls 
him,  who  *'  shifted  his  trumpet  and  only  took 
snuff"  when  the  enthusiastic  lady  talked  to  him 
of  her  art  achievements.  Here,  too,  she  met 
"Windham,  whose  published  Diary,  however, 
contains  nothing  very  important  about  her.  The 
queen,  to  whom  she  had  hitherto  forwarded 
copies  of  her  works,  gave  her  a  private  audience ; 
Lord  Mansfield,  then  over  eighty  years  of  age, 
asked  permission  to  visit  her,  and  presented  her 
with  a  moss-rose  tree,whichshe  claimstohave  first 
introduced  into  France.  She  made  an  excursion 
to  Blenheim,  where  the  Duchess  of  Marlborough 
finding  out  by  the  lodge-book  how  celebrated  a 
lady  had  left  her  grounds,  sent  a  servant  after 
her  with  a  present  of  pine-apples.  She  offered 
the  man  a  guinea,  which  he  refused,  saying, 
"  Madame,  I  cannot  accept  it  —  I  am  a  French- 
man." Another  visit  was  paid  to  the  son-in-law 
of  Richardson,  who  (she  says)  offered  her  a  MS. 
copy  of  Pamela,  corrected  by  the  author  him- 
self, upon  the  condition  that  she  would  translate 
it  literally,  a  proposition  which  she  did  not  con- 
sider herself  to  be  warranted  in  making.  Mr. 
Bridget  took  her  to  St.  Bride's,  in  the  aisle  of 
which  his  father-in-law  lay  buried,  and  told  her 
that  the  year  before  a  great  French  lady,  Madame 
du  Tess6,  had  flung  herself  down  upon  the  stone. 


i8o  Four  Frenchwomen. 

crying  and  groaning  so  terribly  as  to  make  her 
companion  fear  that  she  would  faint.  If  any- 
where in  that  old  churchyard  was  wandering  the 
spirit  of  the  mild-eyed,  half-feminine  little  printer, 
it  must  have  felt  a  well-nigh  mortal  vanity  at  such 
an  offering  of  sentimental  tears. 

Horace  Walpole  has  left  an  account  in  his 
correspondence  of  her  appearance  at  Strawberry 
Hill.  The  ingenious  virtuoso,  who,  with  a  little 
Attic  salt  —  or,  rather,  for  the  sake  of  it — would 
have  eaten  his  dearest  friend,  had  been  making 
very  merry  in  his  previous  letters  over  "  Rous- 
seau's hen — the  schoolmistress,  Madame  de 
Genlis  "  — the  "  moral  Madame  de  Genlis,"  as 
he  was  pleased  to  style  her.  His  description, 
however,  betrays  a  greater  admiration  than 
might  have  been  anticipated,  and  as  a  whole  — 
one  sidelong  sarcasm  excepted  —  is  certainly  in 
her  favour.  "  Ten  days  ago,"  he  writes  to  the 
Countess  of  Ossory,  "  Mrs.  Cosway  sent  me  a 
note  that  Madame  desired  a  ticket  for  Straw- 
berry Hill.  I  thought  I  could  not  do  less  than 
offer  her  a  breakfast,  and  named  yesterday  se'n- 
night.  Then  came  a  message  that  she  must  go  to 
Oxford  and  take  her  Doctor's  degree  ;  and  then 
another  that  I  should  see  her  yesterday"  [July 
22d,  lyS")],  "  when  she  did  arrive,  with  Miss 
Wilkes"  [John "Wilkes's daughter]  "and  Pamela, 


Madame  de  Genii's.  i8i 

whom  she  did  not  even  present  to  me,  and  whom 
she  has  educated  to  be  very  like  herself  in  the 
face.  I  told  her  I  could  not  attribute  the  honour 
of  her  visit  but  to  my  late  dear  friend,  Madame 
du  DeflFand.  ...  Her  person  is  agreeable,  and 
she  seems  to  have  been  pretty.  Her  conversa- 
tion is  natural  and  reasonable,  not  prdcieuse  and 
affected,  and  searching  to  be  eloquent,  as  I 
had  expected.  I  asked  her  if  she  had  been 
pleased  with  Oxford,  meaning  the  buildings,  not 
the  wretched  oafs  who  inhabit  it.  She  said  she 
had  had  little  time  ;  that  she  had  wished  to  learn 
their  plan  of  education,  which,  as  she  said  sen- 
sibly, she  supposed  was  adapted  to  our  Consti- 
tution. I  could  have  told  her  that  it  is  exactly 
repugnant  to  our  Constitution,  and  that  nothing 
is  taught  there  but  drunkenness  and  prerogative 
—  or,  in  their  language.  Church  and  King.  I 
asked  her  if  it  is  true  that  the  new  edition  of 
Voltaire's  works  is  prohibited.  She  replied, 
severely,  and  then  condemned  those  who  write 
against  religion  and  government,  which  was  a 
little  unlucky  before  her  friend  Miss  Wilkes. 
She  stayed  two  hours,  and  returns  to  France 
to-day  to  her  duty.'" 

Madame  la  Comtesse,  consequently,  went 
back  to  France  towards  the  end  of  July,  after  a 
six  weeks'  stay — six  weeks,  let  us  note,  very 


1 82  Four  Frenchwomen. 

fully  occupied,  if  we  add  to  the  "  excursions, 
visits,  and  entertainments,"  a  certain  amount  of 
time  which  her  indefatigable  energy  set  aside  for 
a  tutor  in  English  declamation,  and  a  jeweller 
who  taught  her  to  make  ornaments  in  seed  pearl. 
Her  next  visit  took  place  in  1791.  The  event- 
ful years  which  occupy  the  interval  are  hardly 
noticed  in  the  Memoirs,  which  for  this  period 
are  almost  wholly  taken  up  with  the  account  of 
her  rupture  with  the  Duchess  of  Orleans.  The 
causes  are  stated  obscurely  enough.  Whether 
the  alleged  "  difference  of  opinion  "  was  the 
real  source  of  disagreement,  or  whether  this  was 
a  delicate  euphemism  for  the  tardy  recognition 
by  the  wife  of  Egalit^  of  a  yet  deeper  and  graver 
wrong,  it  would  be  difficult  to  decide.  One 
thing  is  clear,  and  this  is  the  pelican-like  self- 
denial  and  heartrending  forbearance  of  Madame 
la  Comtesse.  Another  thing  appears  certain  — 
that  whether  her  influence  over  the  duke  was  or 
was  not  exercised  previously  to  the  Revolution, 
she  acquired  the  reputation  of  being  his  adviser, 
and  added  to  her  detractors  all  his  political  op- 
ponents. The  duchess  tried  vainly  to  oblige 
her  to  resign,  but  the  Governor,  insisting  upon  a 
real  or  feigned  attachment  to  Mile.  d'Orleans, 
kept  her  place  in  spite  of  everything,  until  at 
last  her  opponent  gave  up  the  matter  in  despair. 


Madame  de  Genii's.  183 

One  of  the  results  of  this  quarrel  was  the  pub- 
lication of  the  Lei^ons  d'une  Gouvernante,  in 
which  she  printed  an  account  of  the  affair,  to- 
gether with  extracts  of  the  journals  kept  of  the 
education  of  her  pupils.  This  was  in  August, 
1791.  In  the  October  of  the  same  year  permis- 
sion was  at  last  given  by  the  Duke  of  Orleans, 
and  the  ill-health  of  Mademoiselle  serving  as  a 
pretext,  they  (Pamela,  Henrietta  Sercey,  the 
countess,  and  her  charge)  crossed  to  England  to 
take  the  Bath  waters.  After  two  months  spent 
at  that  place,  where,  despite  our  disreputable 
comedies,  they  sedulously  frequented  the  theatre, 
they  removed  to  Bury  St.  Edmunds,  where  they 
lived  for  several  months  in  comparative  retire- 
ment, only  making  occasional  excursions  to 
different  parts  of  the  country.  At  Bury  they 
became  acquainted  with  Mr.  Howard,  after- 
wards Duke  of  Norfolk,  Mr.  Hervey,  after- 
wards Lord  Bristol,  and  saw  something  of  the 
famous  agriculturist,  Arthur  Young.  They  were 
visited  by  Windham,  Swinburne,  Fox,  and 
Sheridan,  the  latter  having,  possibly,  some  sub- 
ordinate intention  of  flirting  with  Pamela,  whom 
he  undoubtedly  admired,  although,  Mr.  Moore 
infers,  it  is  improbable  that  he  offered  to  marry 
her,  as  Madame  de  Genlis  would  have  us  to  be- 
lieve.    Besides,  it  was  only  during  her  stay  at 


184  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

Bury  that  he  had  lost  Mrs.  Sheridan,  to  whom 
he  was  greatly  attached. 

Miss  Burney  has  given  us  a  little  glimpse  of 
the  Bury  life.  When  she  had  first  made  the  ac- 
quaintance of  Madame  de  Genlis,  in  1785,  she 
had  been  greatly  prepossessed  in  her  favour. 
She  is  "  the  sweetest  and  most  accomplished 
Frenchwoman  that  she  ever  met  with."  .  .  . 
*'  I  saw  her  at  first  with  a  prejudice  in  her  dis- 
favour from  the  cruel  reports  I  had  heard,  but 
the  moment  I  looked  at  her  it  was  removed. 
There  was  a  dignity  with  her  sweetness,  and  a 
frankness  with  her  modesty,  that  convinced  me 
beyond  all  power  of  report  of  her  real,  worth  and 
innocence."  And,  indeed,  she  seems  to  have  had 
all  through  a  kind  of  liking  for  her,  although  she 
acted  in  opposition  to  her  oft-repeated  convic- 
tion, and  allowed  the  "  cruel  reports"  to  awe 
her  into  keeping  aloof  from  the  "  fascinating 
allurements  "  of  the  lady  who  was  so  anxious  to 
correspond  with  '^  cette  chdre  Miss  Beurni.'^ 
The  Royalists  with  whom  England  was  swarm- 
ing —  men  like  the  Due  de  Liancourt,  who 
spoke,  "with  eyes  of  fire,"  of  this  '■' coquine 
de  Brulart,"''  who  "adored  the  Duchess  of  Or- 
leans," and  would  have  caned  her  husband  in 
the  streets,  as  the  prime  cause  of  his  country's 
misery  —  were  not  likely  to  prejudice  any  one 


Madame  de  Genii's.  185 

in  favour  of  the  clever  "  intrigante  "  who,  as 
they  believed,  had  helped  to  mislead  him.  But 
Miss  Burney  expresses  herself  with  such  a  mys- 
terious and  pious  horror  of  Madame  Brulart 
that  we  sincerely  wish  she  had  cited  something 
a  little  more  shocking  than  the  following  :  — 

"  They  "  [Arthur  Young's  wife  and  daughter] 
•*  give  a  very  unpleasant  account  of  Madame  de 
Genlis,  or  De  Sillery,  or  Brulart,  as  she  is  now 
called.  They  say  she  has  established  herself  at 
Bury,  in  their  neighbourhood,  with  Mile,  la 
Princesse  d'Orleans  and  Pamela,  and  a  Circe  " 
[Henrietta  Sercey],  "  another  young  girl  under 
her  care.  They  have  taken  a  house,  the  master 
of  which  always  dines  with  them,  though  Mrs. 
Young  says  he  is  such  a  low  man  he  should  not 
dine  with  her  daughter.  They  form  twenty  with 
themselves  and  household.  They  keep  a  botanist, 
a  chemist,  and  a  natural  historian  always  with 
them.  These  are  supposed  to  have  been  common 
servants  of  the  Duke  of  Orleans  in  former  days, 
as  they  always  walk  behind  the  ladies  when 
abroad  ;  but,  to  make  amends  in  the  new  equal- 
ising style,  they  all  dine  together  at  home.  They 
visit  at  no  house  but  Sir  Thomas  Gage's,  where 
they  carry  their  harps,  and  frequently  have  music. 
They  have  been  to  a  Bury  ball,  and  danced  all 
night ;  Mile.  d'Orleans  with  anybody,  known  or 


1 86  Four  Frenchwomen. 

unknown  to  Madame  Brulart."  All  this  may 
sound  very  dreadful  to  the  starched  little  Tory 
who  had  given  up  her  literary  fame  for  the 
melancholy  monotony  and  niggard  favours  of 
the  court  of  Queen  Charlotte,  yet  it  scarcely 
deserves  to  be  termed  a  "  woful  change  from 
that  elegant,  amiable,  high-bred  Madame  de 
Genlis"  of  six  years  past,  "  the  apparent  pattern 
of  female  perfection  in  manners,  conversation, 
and  delicacy.'" 

After  the  September  massacres  Madame  de 
Genlis  received  a  letter  from  the  Duke  of  Or- 
leans, bidding  her  to  return  to  France  with  her 
charge.  She  refused  to  do  so,  considering  it 
unreasonable  to  expect  her  to  come  back  at  such 
an  unsettled  period.  Her  position  was  exceed- 
ingly embarrassing,  and  her  active  imagination 
added  greatly  to  the  terrors  of  the  situation. 
"  I  am  uneasy,  sick,  unhappy,"  she  writes  to 
Sheridan  from  Bury,  in  the  "  bad  language  " 
for  which  she  apologises  ;  "  surrounded  by  the 
most  dreadful  snares  of  the  fraud  and  wicked- 
ness"—  "intrusted  with  the  most  interesting 
and  sacred  charge."  In  the  commencement  of 
the  month  of  November  the  duke  sent  an  emis- 
sary charged  to  bring  away  his  daughter,  if  her 
instructress  refused  to  return  with  her.  This, 
acting  upon  Sheridan's  advice,  she  decided  to 


Madame  de  Genii's.  187 

do.  They  set  out  upon  their  perilous  journey 
in  October,  1792.  The  fervid  fancy  of  the 
countess  had  peopled  the  "  antres  vast  and 
deserts  idle  "  that  lay  between  London  and 
Dover  with  innumerable  poniards  aimed  at  the 
existence  of  her  illustrious  pro/</^^2.  Mr.  Sheri- 
dan's propensity  for  practical  joking,  added  to 
the  opportune  recollection  of  an  incident  in  Gold- 
smith's She  Stoops  to  Conquer,  did  not  allow  her 
to  be  disappointed  of  her  romantic  terrors. 

They  went  off  in  two  carriages,  with  a  foot- 
man, hired  for  the  occasion,  and  a  French 
lacquey.  The  remainder  of  the  servants  had 
returned  to  Paris.  After  having  gone  about  a 
mile  the  Frenchman  begins  to  think  that  they 
are  not  in  the  right  road,  a  suspicion  which  he 
easily  communicates  to  his  mistress.  The  post- 
boys, being  examined,  answer  evasively  —  more 
suspicions!  This  is  decidedly  worse  "than 
crossing  the  desert  plains  of  Newmarket,"  which 
had  filled  her  with  such  terrible  anticipations  a  day 
or  two  before.  However,  on  they  go  for  three- 
quarters  of  an  hour  more,  passing  quickly  through 
an  utterly  unknown,  or  seemingly  unknown, 
tract  of  country.  The  post-boys  and  hired  foot- 
man, again  applied  to,  again  reply  —  evasively. 
More  rapidly  than  ever  they  pursue  their  un- 
certain route,  the  post-boys  answering  all  ques- 


i88  Four  Fienchwomen. 

tions  laconically,  unwillingly,  mysteriously,  and 
appearing  most  unaccountably  afraid  to  come  to 
a  stop.  At  last  they  confess  to  the  remarkable 
fact  that  they  have  "lost  their  way"  between 
London  and  Dover,  but  that  they  are  now  well 
on  the  road  to  their  next  stage,  which  is  Dart- 
ford.  This  is  a  relief;  but  as  the  journey  still 
continues  for  an  hour  at  least,  the  countess  in- 
sists, notwithstanding  all  the  objections  of  the 
incomprehensible  post-boys,  upon  stopping  at  a 
village  to  inquire  where  she  is.  "  About  twenty- 
two  miles  from  Dartford,"  they  obligingly  inform 
her.  Thereupon,  the  post-boys  resisting  to  the 
last,  she  goes  back  to  London  forthwith,  finding 
herself,  strange  to  say,  at  an  easy  and  convenient 
distance  from  this  her  starting-place. 

No  clue  is  given  to  this  highly  romantic  ex- 
pedition d  la  Mrs.  Hardcastle.  "  I  merely  re- 
late the  facts  without  explanation,  or  the  addition 
of  any  reflections  of  my  own,  as  the  impartial 
reader  can  make  them  for  himself."  But  when 
we  remember  the  shameful  trick  that  the  "  First 
Gentleman  in  Europe"  played  upon  the  old  Duke 
of  Norfolk  at  the  Pavilion  on  the  Steyne  —  when 
we  recall  the  mishaps  of  Madame  Duval,  as  re- 
corded in  Evelina — and  above  all,  when  we 
learn  that  the  result  of  this  journey  from  London 
to  London  was  to  cause  the  detention  of  the 


Madame  de  Genlis.  189 

whole  party  at  Sheridan's  country  house  for  a 
month,  and  consider,  too,  his  prompt  hushing- 
up  of  the  whole  aflfair,  it  is  hardly  possible  not 
to  agree  with  his  biographer  that  the  trick  was 
of  his  contriving.  At  any  rate,  with  him,  at 
Isleworth  they  remained  until  the  end  of  No- 
vember, when  their  host  accompanied  them  to 
Dover. 

They  arrived  at  Paris  only  to  discover  that, 
as  she  had  failed  to  return  earlier.  Mile.  d'Or- 
leans  was  then,  by  the  recent  law,  included 
among  the  imigris.  No  course  was  open  to 
Madame  de  Genlis  but  to  act  in  accordance 
with  the  duke's  desire,  and  carry  her  pupil  to  a 
neutral  country  until  such  time  as  she  should  be 
excepted  from  the  list.  A  day  or  two  before 
their  departure  for  the  place  chosen — Tournay 
—  her  husband,  now  M.  de  Sillery,  took  them 
to  see  Lodohka  at  one  of  the  theatres.  It  was 
here  that  Lord  Edward  Fitzgerald  (who  had 
hitherto,  from  a  dread  of  learned  ladies,  studi- 
ously kept  aloof  from  Madame  la  Comtesse) 
saw  Pamela  for  the  first  time.  She  is  said  to 
have  borne  a  singular  resemblance  to  Mrs. 
Sheridan,  whom  he  had  greatly  admired,  and 
who,  indeed,  according  to  Moore's  Life,  had 
even  expressed  a  wish  that  after  her  death  he 
should  marry  this  very  girl,  whose  beauty  and 


190  Four  Frenchwomen. 

resemblance  to  herself,  her  husband,  fresh  from 
some  recent  excursion  to  Bury,  had  been  enthu- 
siastically describing.  Lord  Edward  fell  in  love 
on  the  spot,  made  an  immediate  acquaintance, 
and  following  them  to  Tournay,  proposed,  was 
accepted,  and  there  married  at  the  end  of  De- 
cember to  the  citoyenne  Anne  Caroline  Stephanie 
Syms,  otherwise  Pamela,  born  at  Fogo  [r]  in 
Newfoundland,  daughter  of  Guillaume  de  Brixey 
and  Mary  Syms,  in  the  presence  of,  and  assisted 
by,  the  cito/ennes  Brulart-Sillery  and  Addle 
Egalit6,  the  citoyens  Philippe  Egalite  and  Louis 
Philippe  Egalite,  General  O'Moran,  and  others. 
Despite  this  circumstantial  fiction  (which 
courtesy  requires  us  to  preserve),  loquacious 
Rumour  persists  in  assigning  a  very  different 
parentage  to  "  the  dear  little,  pale,  pretty  wife," 
as  he  calls  her,  of  the  ill-fated  Fitzgerald.  And, 
unless  we  are  mistaken.  Rumour  is  supported  by 
these  words  from  one  of  his  letters  to  his  mother, 
the  Duchess  of  Leinster,  in  January,  1794:  — 
"  My  dear  little  wife  has,  upon  the  whole, 
been  cheerful  and  amused,  which,  of  course, 
pleases  me.  I  never  have  received  an  answer 
from  her  mother,  so  that  Pamela  is  still  ignorant 
of  what  has  happened."  There  is  but  one  per- 
son to  whom  the  title  can  allude,  and  amongst 
other  things  that  had  recently  happened  was  the 


Madame  de  Genii's.  191 

death,  in  November,  1793,  of  one  of  the  most 
illustrious  witnesses  of  the  Tournay  marriage, 
the  sometime  Duke  of  Orleans  —  Philippe 
Egalit^. 


VIII. 

In  January,  1794,  when  the  last-mentioned 
letter  was  written,  Madame  de  Genlis  had  found 
a  resting-place  in  the  convent  of  St.  Claire,  at 
Bremgarten,  in  Switzerland.  Mile.  d'Orleans 
was  still  with  her.  No  one  had  arrived  to  re- 
lieve the  ex-governor  of  a  charge  who,  we  are 
inclined  to  fancy,  had  ceased  to  be  as  "  interest- 
ing" and  "sacred"  as  of  yore.  Then  came 
the  king's  death  and  the  declaration  of  war. 
"  We  could  not  remain  at  Tournay,"  writes 
Mademoiselle,  ''  as  the  Austrians  were  about  to 
enter  it ;  and  could  not  return  to  France,  as  a 
law  forbade  us  to  do  so,  upon  pain  of  death  ; 
M.  Dumouriez  offered  us  an  asylum  in  his  camp. 
We  set  out  with  his  army,  and  stopped  in  the 
town  of  St.  Amand,  while  he  remamed  at  the 
mineral  springs,  a  quarter  of  a  league  distant." 
But  a  revolt  broke  out  in  the  camp,  and  Madame 
de  Genlis,  yielding  to  the  wish  of  the  Duke  de 
Chartres,  fled  in  haste  to  Mons  with  his  sister. 
Thence  passing  to  Switzerland,  they  found  sane- 


192  Four  Frenchwomen. 

tuary  at  Bremgarten,  there  to  remain  until  at 
last,  in  May,  1794,  Mademoiselle  was  received 
by  her  aunt,  the  Princess  de  Conti,  who  was 
living  at  Friburg.  Meanwhile  her  brave  young 
brother,  after  fighting  his  way  out  from  the  camp 
of  Dumouriez,  had  quietly  settled  down  to  teach 
mathematics  in  a  college  of  the  Grisons  under 
the  pseudonym  of  Corby. 

The  next  halt  of  the  countess  was  made  at 
Altona,  where,  amongst  other  things,  she  gained 
her  livelihood  by  painting  patterns  for  a  cloth 
manufactory.  Her  husband  had  voted  against 
the  death  of  the  king,  and  had  been  guillotined 
in  1793  with  the  Girondins.  The  sole  protdg^e 
who  remained  to  her  now  was  Henrietta  Sercey, 
whom  she  had  left  at  Utrecht  under  the  protec- 
tion of  a  foreign  lady.  At  Altona  she  lived  at 
an  inn  called  "  Flock's,''  the  master  of  which 
was  well  affected  to  the  Revolution,  and  where 
she  was  known  by  the  name  of  "  Miss  Clarke." 
During  all  this  time  (she  says)  it  was  commonly 
supposed  that  she  was  living  with  Dumouriez  ; 
in  fact,  it  was  often  asserted  in  her  presence  at 
the  table  dlidte,  and,  besides,  industriously  cir- 
culated by  all  the  dmigrds,  who  still  persisted  in 
regarding  her  as  "  one  of  the  principal  authors 
of  the  Revolution."  Her  slight  connection  with 
the  general  (and  she  insists  that  it  was  slight) 


Madame  de  Genlis.  193 

had  added  to  her  enemies  all  the  patriots  who 
hated  him  for  his  treason.  She  managed,  how- 
ever, to  live  here  nine  months  undiscovered, 
spending  her  days  with  the  inevitable  harp,  her 
paint-box,  and  her  ink-bottle,  not  omitting,  be- 
sides, to  diversify  them  with  waltzes  and  games 
in  the  rooms  of  a  neighbouring  Madame  Gudin, 
and  even  finding  time  to  inspire  the  admiration 
of  a  middle-aged  baker,  who  made  her  a  pro- 
posal. While  here  she  learned  the  death,  on 
the  memorable  28th  of  July,  1794,  of  Maximilian 
Robespierre,  and  the  termination  of  the  Terror. 
*'  I  was  greatly  surprised  at  hearing  loud  and 
repeated  knocks  at  my  door"  [it was  one  o'clock 
in  the  morning],  "  and  was  still  more  so  when 
I  recognised  the  voice  of  my  peaceful  neighbour, 
M.  de  Kercy  "  [a  Frenchman  and  patriot  who 
lived  in  the  house].  *'  He  cried  out  to  me, 
'  Ouvre\  !  ouvre^  !  il  faut  que  je  vous  embrasse  ! ' 
As  I  did  not  yield  to  this  singular  request,  he 
cried  out  all  the  more,  '  It  is  you  who  will  want 
to  embrace  me  yourself  —  open,  open  I '  and  at 
last  I  obeyed.  M.  de  Kercy  sprang  towards 
me,  crying,  '  The  tyrant  is  gone  at  last,  Robes- 
pierre is  dead  1  '  and,  to  tell  the  truth,  I  imme- 
diately hugged  him  with  all  my  heart.  Next  day 
we  learned  that  the  news  of  his  death  had  pro- 
duced quite  a  contrary  effect  on  one  of  the  most 
13 


194  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

violent  of  his  partisans  —  and  there  were  many 
in  Holstein.  One  of  these  profound  politicians 
was  struck  with  such  sorrow  on  hearing  of  his 
tragical  end,  that  he  instantly  fell  dead  upon 
the  spot." 

In  1795  she  left  Altona  and  went  to  Hamburg. 
At  "  P/oc/c'5  "  she  had  written  Les  Chevaliers 
du  Cfgne,  a  tale  of  the  court  of  Charlemagne, 
which  she  now  sold  ;  and  during  her  stay  at 
Hamburg  she  composed  the  Precis  de  ma  con- 
duite  pendant  la  Revolution,  which  (she  asserts) 
produced  a  powerful  effect  in  her  favour  through- 
out Germany,  although  it  does  not  appear  that 
the  stories  which  were  told  about  h.er  lost,  in 
consequence,  either  narrators  or  listeners. 
"Whilst  at  this  place  she  parted  with  Henrietta 
Sercey,  who  was  married  to  a  M,  Matthiessen, 
the  son  of  a  wealthy  merchant.  After  the  mar- 
riage Madame  la  Comtesse  set  out  for  Berlin, 
where  we  next  find  her  domesticated  with  a 
Mademoiselle  Bocquet,  who  kept  a  boardmg- 
school  in  that  city,  and  who  ''  had  received  her 
with  open  arms."  With  her  new  admirer's  aid 
she  found  a  publisher  for  an  already  commenced 
novel,  Les  Vceux  Tdnidraires ;  but  no  sooner 
was  this  done  than,  by  the  influence  of  the  emi- 
grants, the  king  was  induced  to  believe  that  she 
was  a  most  dangerous  character,  and  in  conse- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  195 

quence  forbade  her  to  remain  in  his  dominions. 
"  He  would  not  banish  her  from  his  library,"  he 
is  reported  to  have  said,  "  but  she  must  quit  his 
territories."  Her  spirits,  however,  did  not  de- 
sert her.  She  shook  the  dust  from  her  feet  at 
the  frontier  with  the  following  verses.  The 
poor  German  officer  who  served  as  her  escort, 
had  been  charged  to  obtain  from  her  a  written 
promise  that  she  would  not  return  to  Prussia  ; 
she  gave  him  these,  which  he  took  with  the 
greatest  simplicity  :  — 

"  Malgri  man  go&t  pour  Us  voyages, 
ye  promets,  avec  grand  plaisir, 
D' toiler,  et  mime  de  fuir 
Ce  royaume  dont  les  usages 
N^invitent  pas  ct  revenir.'^ 

But  she  did  not  keep  her  promise.  After  an 
intervening  period  spent  between  Hamburg  and 
Brevel  she  returned  to  Berlin.  The  king  was 
dead  ;  his  successor  had  no  objection  to  her 
either  upon  his  shelves  or  elsewhere,  and  Mile. 
Bocquet's  arms  were  as  open  as  before.  The 
curious  antipathy  felt  to  her  by  the  emigrants  is 
very  ungallantly  evidenced  in  the  succeeding 
extract :  — 

"  My  parlour  had  two  doors,  one  opening 
into  my  room,  the  other  upon  a  private  staircase 
that  led  into  the  court,  so  that  I  had  two  ways 


196  Four  Frenchwomen. 

of  getting  out.  Upon  the  landing-place  was  a 
door,  facing  mine,  and  leading  to  the  room  of 
an  imigri  who,  Mademoiselle  Bocquet  told  me, 
was  of  a  very  solitary  temper,  and  knew  no  one 
in  the  house.  I  had  received  a  present  of  two 
pots  of  fine  hyacinths.  As  I  dread  the  smell  of 
flowers  at  night,  and  wished  to  leave  my  parlour- 
door  open  for  the  sake  of  fresh  air,  I  took  it 
into  my  head  to  put  them  out  on  the  landing- 
place,  between  my  neighbour's  door  and  my 
own.  The  next  morning  I  went  to  take  in  the 
flowers,  and  was  disagreeably  surprised  at  see- 
ing my  beautiful  hyacinths  cut  into  little  pieces 
and  scattered  round  the  pots.  I  could  easily 
guess  that  my  emigrant  neighbour  was  the  author 
of  this  deed,  which  doubtless,  in  spite  of  French 
gallantry,  the  libels  published  against  me  had 
induced  him  to  commit.  As  I  did  not  wish  to 
tell  the  incident  that  had  occurred,  I  did  not  ask 
for  any  more  hyacinths  from  those  who  had 
given  me  the  others  ;  but  I  told  a  servant  to  buy 
me  some.  She  could  not  find  any ;  but  she 
brought  me  some  other  flowers  with  which  I 
filled  one  of  the  pots,  and  pasted  on  it  a  slip  of 
paper, upon  which  I  wrote  these  words:  — '  Tear 
up  my  works  if  you  will,  but  respect  those  of 
God.'  In  the  evening  before  going  to  bed  I  put 
the  pot  upon  the  landing-place,  and  upon  waking 


Madame  de  Genii s.  197 

the  next  morning  was  very  curious  to  ascertain 
the  fate  of  my  flowers.  I  got  up  immediately 
to  go  and  look,  and  found  to  my  delight  that  the 
stranger  had  been  satisfied  with  watering  them. 
I  immediately  carried  them  into  the  parlour,  and 
in  placing  them  upon  a  table  I  perceived  hanging 
from  two  of  the  flowers,  two  green  threads,  each 
bearing  a  beautiful  little  cornelian  ring.  The 
emigrant  had  been  desirous  of  repairing  the 
wrong  he  had  done,  and  evidently  knew  that  at 
this  time  I  was  forming  a  collection  of  cornelian 
trinkets  ;  I  had  rings  of  cornelian,  seals,  hearts, 
little  boxes,  and  the  like.  All  my  resentment 
vanished  at  this  proceeding.  The  most  singu- 
lar thing  was,  that  the  imigrd  stopped  at  that, 
never  wrote  to  me,  did  not  ask  to  see  me,  and 
sent  me  no  message.  I  imitated  his  discretion, 
and  this  was  the  first  and  last  time  we  ever  had 
anything  to  do  with  each  other." 

With  this  closes  volume  four  of  the  Memoirs, 
which  henceforward  decrease  greatly  in  interest. 
Nothing  but  the  vow  of  poverty  which  she  had 
made  in  exile  can  excuse  such  an  excessive  prod- 
igality of  souvenirs.  Madame  la  Comtesse  is 
far  too  kind.  De  omnibus  rebus  was  just  endur- 
able ;  de  quibusdam  aliis  is  more  than  we  can 
bear.  Endless  extracts  from  her  own  works, 
copious  cuttings  from  the  works  of  other  people. 


198  Four  Frenchwomen. 

spiteful  little  scratches  at  shining  reputations,  de- 
tails of  petty  quarrels,  ^^  misdres  du  monde  par- 
leur,  du  monde  scribe  f'''  rambling  discussions  "  d 
propos  de  bottes,"  and  rare  digressions  to  an 
eventless  biography  —  these  are  the  farrago  of 
the  remaining  volumes,  not  luminous  now,  but 
voluminous,  not  fluent,  but  superfluous.  The 
material,  in  fact,  is  mainly  what,  in  the  earlier 
portion,  the  prudent  reader  skipped  or  slumbered 
over  —  and  life  is  too  short  for  such  interminable 
and  irrelevant  loquacity. 

We  shall  take  the  liberty,  therefore,  of  com- 
pressing into  a  few  brief  sentences  the  more 
material  occurrences  of  the  long  period  which 
lies  between  us  and  her  death,  contenting  our- 
selves, for  the  rest,  with  the  reproduction  of 
such  extracts  as  we  have  been  able  to  glean  from 
the  records  of  her  contemporaries.  The  friend- 
ship with  Mile.  Bocquet  having  terminated  in 
a  quarrel,  she  remained  at  Berlin,  supporting 
herself  by  writing,  making  trinkets,  and  taking 
pupils,  until  she  was  recalled  to  France  under 
the  Consulate.  She  came  to  Paris,  bringing  with 
her  a  child  she  had  adopted  in  Prussia,  Casimir 
Baecker,  afterwards  a  celebrated  harp-player, 
whose  attachment  to  his  benefactress  must  have 
been  a  considerable  solace  to  the  pupilless  old 
lady.     She  was  without  personal  property,  and 


Madame  de  Genii's.  199 

had  consequently  but  little  to  receive.  Mara- 
dan,  the  bookseller,  engaged  her  to  write  novels 
for  a  certain  salary,  and  she  published  during  the 
first  years  of  the  century  her  most  perfect  and 
popular  works.  From  Napoleon  she  received 
a  pension  and  rooms  in  the  Arsenal.  For  this 
she  was  to  write  fortnightly  letters  to  him  upon 
general  subjects  —  copious  excerpts  from  which 
adorn  the  pages  of  the  Memoirs.  Other  small 
pensions  sufficed  to  place  her  beyond  the  reach 
of  want  —  although  she  was  never  rich.  Her 
energy,  activity,  and  taste  for  writing  continued 
unabated,  until  at  last,  one  New  Year's  Day,  a 
journalistic  pen,  preoccupied  above  all  with  the 
desire  of  being  brilliant,  recorded  her  death  in 
the  following  words  :  —  "  Madame  de  Genlis  a 
cessd  d'  icrire  ;  c'est  annoncer  sa  morl.'"'' 

Her  society,  we  are  informed  by  Madame  la 
Comtesse  de  Bradi,  a  lady  who  knew  her  for 
the  last  thirty  years  of  her  life,  was  greatly 
sought  after,  but  she  made  no  effort  to  retain 
more  than  a  small  coterie  of  admirers.  Upon  the 
return  of  the  Bourbons  she  lost  the  imperial 
assistance,  but  the  Orleans  family  gave  her  the 
customary  allowances  as  a  quondam  Gouverneur 
and  Gouvernanie.  Faithful,  however,  to  the 
vow  of  poverty  which  she  had  made  at  St. 
Amand,  she  gave  away  all  that  she  possessed  to 


200  Four  Frenchwomen. 

those  about  her.  "  Money  from  her  pensions, 
presents  from  her  pupils  or  her  friends,  every- 
thing was  distributed  as  soon  as  received,"  and 
Vi^hen  she  died  a  few  worn  and  homely  articles 
of  furniture  were  all  she  left  behind  her. 

In  1816  she  was  visited  at  Paris  by  that  "  wild 
Irish  girl  "  who  now  sleeps  calmly  enough  in  the 
Brompton  Cemetery  below  her  shattered  and 
stringless  harp  —  Sydney,  Lady  Morgan.  That 
lady  was  then  writing  those  very  volumes  of 
France  which  so  roused  the  malevolence  of  Mr. 
Croker  against  their  witty  Whig  authoress.  ' '  Elle 
s'esl  jeUe  dans  la  religion,''  "  she  has  shut  her- 
self up  in  a  convent  of  Capucines,""  the  gossips 
told  her,  when  she  inquired  for  the  famous 
old  countess.  "  It  is  impossible  to  see  her,  for 
she  is  invisible  alike  to  friends  and  strangers." 
Nevertheless,  Lady  Morgan,  to  her  delight, 
received  an  invitation  to  the  Convent  of  Carme- 
lites, in  the  Rue  de  Vaugirard,  where  Madame 
de  Genlis  was  then  domesticated.  She  found 
her  in  an  "  apartment  that  might  have  answered 
equally  for  the  oratory  of  a  saint  or  the  boudoir 
of  a  coquette.''  Books  lay  scattered  upon  the 
table  —  a  strange  mixture  of  the  sacred  and  pro- 
fane ;  a  great  crucifix  hung  forward  over  the 
elegant  Grecian  couch  of  the  Empire  ;  chaplets 
and  rosaries  contended  with  her  lute  and  her 


Madame  de  Genii s.  201 

paintings  upon  the  wall  —  with  blue  silk  draper- 
ies, white  vases,  and  freshly-gathered  flowers. 

She  was  now  seventy,  but  time  had  used  her 
tenderly.  An  accident,  indeed,  had  slightly 
injured  the  nose  iL  la  Roxalane  which  had  been 
"  so  much  celebrated  in  prose  and  verse,  and 
which  "  —  to  use  her  own  expression  —  "  she 
had  hitherto  preserved  intact  in  all  its  delicacy." 
The  beautiful  hands  and  feet  that  Madame  de 
Bradi  praises  were,  we  presume,  as  beautiful  as 
ever  ;  the  eyes  were  still  full  of  life  and  expres- 
sion ;  but  the  delicate  features  were  worn  and 
sharply  marked,  and  the  brilliant  complexion 
which  had  been  her  greatest  beauty  had  waned 
and  faded.  Yet  "  infirmity  seemed  to  have 
spared  the  slight  and  emaciated  figure,"  and  be- 
yond these  "  the  traces  of  age  were  neither  deep 
nor  multiplied."  She  received  her  visitor  "  with 
a  kindness  and  cordiality  that  had  all  the  naiveU 
and  freshness  of  youthful  feeling  and  youthful 
vivacity.  There  was  nothing  of  age  in  her  ad- 
dress or  conversation,"  says  Lady  Morgan,  "and 
vigour,  animation,  a  tone  of  decision,  a  rapidity 
of  utterance  spoke  the  full  possession  of  every 
feeling  and  every  faculty  ;  and  I  found  her  in 
the  midst  of  occupations  and  pursuits  which 
might  startle  the  industry  of  youth  to  undertake 
or  to  accomplish." 


202  Four  Frenchwomen. 

"  When  I  entered  her  apartment  she  was 
painting  flowers  in  a  book,  which  she  called  her 
'  her  bier  sacrd,'  in  which  she  was  copying  all  the 
plants  mentioned  in  the  Bible.  She  showed  me 
another  volume,  which  she  had  just  finished,  full 
of  trophies  and  tasteful  devices,  which  she  called 
'  Vherbier  de  reconnaissance.'  '  But  I  have  but 
little  time  for  such  idle  amusements,'  said  she. 
She  was,  in  fact,  then  engaged  in  abridging  some 
ponderous  tomes  of  French  mdmoires  "  [probably 
those  of  the  Marquis  de  Dangeau],  "  in  writing 
her  Journal  de  la  Jeunesse,  and  in  preparing  for 
the  press  her  new  novel,  Les  Batludcas,  which 
has  since"  [in  1817]  "been  given  to  the'world." 

"  Her  harp  was  nevertheless  well  strung  and 
tuned,  her  pianoforte  covered  with  new  music, 
and  when  I  gave  her  her  lute,  to  play  for  me,  it 
did  not  require  the  drawing  up  of  a  single  string.' 
All  was  energy  and  occupation.  It  was  impos- 
sible not  to  make  some  observation  on  such  ver- 
satility of  talent  and  variety  of  pursuits.  '  Oh, 
this  is  nothing,'  said  Madame  de  Genlis,  *  what 
I  pride  myself  on  is  knowing  twenty  trades,  by 
all  of  which  I  could  earn  my  bread.'  " 

M.  Barri^re  saw  her  in  1823,  or  two  years 
before  the  publication  of  the  Memoirs.  The 
story  is  the  same.  She  is  still  the  "  little  lively 
old  woman "  of  Moore.     This  time  the   sur- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  203 

foundings  are  hardly  as  elegant  —  the  apartments 
a  middling  first-floor  in  the  Place  Royale.  She 
was  seated  at  a  common  deal  table  heaped  with 
a  pell-mell  of  articles  from  the  breakfast  and 
toilet  table,  the  studio,  the  library,  and  the 
workshop  —  a  miscellaneous  olla-podrida,  from 
which  her  visitor  does  not  fail  to  draw  its  moral. 
Nevertheless,  she  did  the  honours  of  her  hermit- 
age **  with  the  tone,  the  ease,  the  perfect  amia- 
bility of  a  femme  du  grande  monde.'''  She 
praised  the  young  lady  visitor  whom  he  had 
brought  with  him.  She  reminded  her  of  her  own 
youth,  she  said.  "  They  will  tell  you,"  said  the 
old  countess,  "  that  I  was  beautiful  —  very 
beautiful;  don't  believe  them,  it  is  not  true  — 
mais  f  dials  excess'wement  jolie !  " 

The  last  account  which  we  shall  cite  (com- 
pleting our  claim  to  that  first  excellence  of  the 
biographer's  art  —  the  will  to  stand  aside  when 
better  voices  speak)  is  Mrs.  Opie.  The  date 
is  1830.  The  Quaker  authoress  and  painter's 
wife  was  staying  at  Paris.  Her  friend  M. 
Moreau  had  invited  the  old  countess  to  dine 
with  him,  and  they  went  together  to  call  upon 
and  fetch  her.  "  She  received  me  kindly,"  says 
Mrs.  Opie,  "  and  I,  throwing  myself  on  my 
feelings,  and  remembering  how  much  I  owed 
her  in  the  days  of  my  childhood,  became  enthu- 


204  Pour  Frenchwomen. 

siastically  drawn  towards  her  very  soon.  She 
is  a  really  pretty  old  woman  of  eighty-seven  " 
[eighty-four],  "  very  uneflFected,  with  nothing  of 
smartness,  or  affected  state  or  style,  about  her. 
We  passed  through  her  bedroom  (in  which  hung 
a  crucifix)  to  her  salon,  where  she  sat,  much 
muffled  up,  over  her  wood  fire  ;  she  had  dined 
at  three  o'clock,  not  expecting  to  be  able  to  go 
out,  but,  as  the  weather  was  fine,  she  soon  con- 
sented to  accompany  us,  but  she  laughing  said 
she  must  now  go  without  ' sa  belle  robe.''  We 
said  in  any  gown  she  would  be  welcome  ;  she 
then  put  on  a  very  pretty  white  silk  bonnet  and 
a  clean  frill,  and  we  set  off.  ..." 

The  old  countess  said  little  at  dinner,  but 
nothing  was  lost  upon  her.  There  was  a  dis- 
tinguished party  present,  who  drank  her  health 
after  a  most  flattering  speech  from  their  host. 
"  I  thought  Madame  de  G.  conducted  herself 
on  this  occasion  with  much  simple  dignity  ;  yet 
it  was  a  proud  moment  for  her.  She  murmured 
something  (and  looked  at  me)  about  wishing  the 
health  of  Madame  Opie  to  be  drunk,  but  no  one 
heard  her  but  myself"  [she  was  seated  next  her], 
"  and  I  was  really  glad.  When  we  rose  from 
table,  most  of  the  gentlemen  accompanied 
us.  The  room  now  filled  with  French,  English, 
and  Americans  ;   many  were  presented  to  the 


Madame  de  Genlis.  205 

venerable  countess,  next  to  whom  I  sat,  and 
then  to  me  ;  she  seemed  to  enjoy  a  scene  to 
which  for  some  time  she  had  been  a  stranger. 
I  found,  while  I  was  conversing  on  some  inter- 
esting subjects,  she  had  been  observing  me. 
Afterwards  she  said  '  Je  vous  aime ! '  she  then 
added,  with  an  archness  of  countenance  and 
vivacity  of  manner,  the  remnant  of  her  best  days, 
*  je  vous  sime  '  (imitating  the  bad  pronunciation 
of  some  foreigner).  At  half-past  ten  I  saw  C. 
Moreau  lead  Madame  de  G.  out,  and  I  followed 
them,  and  paid  her  every  attention  in  my  power, 
for  which  she  was  grateful ;  when  I  had  wrap- 
ped her  up  and  put  on  her  bonnet  for  her,  my 
servant  got  a  coach,  andC.  M.,  another  gentle- 
man, and  myself  conducted  her  home."  This 
was  on  the  iid  of  November,  1850.  On  the 
31st  of  December  following  the  long  life  ended, 
and  going  to  her  in  the  morning,  they  found  her 
dead  in  her  bed. 

We  have  now  reached  the  term  of  a  paper 
which  has  far  exceeded  its  intended  limits,  but 
which,  nevertheless,  makes  no  kind  of  pretension 
to  exhaustiveness.  "  La  Comlesse  de  Genlis 
divoiUe  " —  to  use  the  Abbe  Mariotini's  title  — 
is  still  to  be  written.  Much  that  has  been  said  to 
her  discredit  bears  so  plainly  the  impress  of  per- 
sonal or  political  animosity  —  is  so  manifestly 


2o6  Four  Frenchwomen. 

hostile  and  ill-natured,  that  any  one,  working 
upon  the  neutral  ground  of  unbiassed  biography, 
might  safely  hope  to  vindicate  her  from  a  great 
deal  that  has  been  urged  against  her.  Unfortu- 
nately, Report  is  thousand-tongued,  and  her 
enemies  were  many  ;  the  records  of  her  friends 
are  few,  their  evidence  meagre,  and  she  has  not 
mended  the  matter  by  the  publication  of  her  vo- 
luminous memoirs.  Such  a  cloud  of  insincerity 
broods  over  her  seemingly  outspoken  pages, 
such  a  crafty  caution  lurks  behind  her  candour, 
she  depreciates  so  insidiously,  so  disingenuously 
commends  her  friends  and  admirers,  that  one 
grows  gradually  to  "  believe  herself  against  her- 
self," to  disallow  her  claim  to  clemency,  to  dis- 
regard her  verities,  and  to  doubt  her  pious 
protestations.  Yet  we  should  be  far  from  styl- 
ing her  (as  did  a  friend  who  looked  over  the 
memoirs)  a  "  Josephms  Surface."  She  is 
more  histrion  than  hypocrite.  The  glare  of  the 
St.  Aubin  footlights  never  quite  faded  from 
her  face  ;  at  no  moment  of  her  life  was  she 
utterly  unconscious  of  the  dress-circle  and  the 
stalls.  Always  upon  a  stage,  the  actress  and  the 
woman  are  so  subtly  intermingled,  that  it  is 
difficult  to  tell  which  is  uppermost  —  harder  to 
separate  the  one  from  the  other.  Considering  her 
in  her  different  parts — as  Comedian  and  School- 


Madame  de  Genlis.  207 

mistress,  Prude,  Pietist,  and  Politician  —  we 
are  inclined  to  admire  her  most  en  Pedagogue. 
It  is  as  the  "  Governor  of  Belle  Chasse  "  that 
she  will  hold  her  place  in  the  rdpertoire.  Of 
her  life,  perhaps  the  last  acts  are  the  best.  For 
the  sake  of  those  for  whom,  like  Mrs.  Opie  and 
Lady  Morgan,  she  is  inseparably  connected  with 
the  early  associations  of  education,  we  willingly 
remember  her  indefatigable  industry  and  untiring 
energy,  her  kindness  to  her  relations  and  admir- 
ers, her  courage  and  patience  in  exile  and  pov- 
erty. She  had  great  talents,  great  perseverance, 
and  a  rare  facility  ;  less  ambitious  of  social  suc- 
cesses, less  satisfied  with  contemporary  praises, 
poorer  and  less  prominently  placed,  she  might 
have  left  an  enduring  name,  or  at  least  deserved 
a  better  epitaph  than  that  of  "  Tou jours  bien  et 
jamais  mieux,'"  with  which  Madame  Guizot  once 
cleverly  characterised  her  productions. 


THE   END. 


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